Emerging Mass Spectrometric Tools for Analysis of Polymers and Polymer Additives

Abstract

The field of mass spectrometry has experienced enormous developments in the last few years. New interesting mass spectrometric techniques have arrived and there have been further developments in the existing methods that have opened up new possibilities for the analysis of increasingly complex polymer structures and compositions. Some of the most interesting emerging techniques for polymer analysis are briefly reviewed in this paper. These include new developments in laser desorption ionization techniques, like solvent-free matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (solvent-free MALDI) and surface-assisted laser desorption ionization (SALDI) mass spectrometry, and the developments in secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), such as gentle-SIMS and cluster SIMS. Desorption electrospray ionization (DESI) mass spectrometry and direct analysis in real time (DART) mass spectrometry offer great possibilities for analysis of solid samples in their native form, while mobility separation prior to mass spectrometric analysis in ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) mass spectrometry further facilitates the analysis of complex polymer structures. The potential of these new developments is still largely unexplored, but they will surely further strengthen the position of mass spectrometry as an irreplaceable tool for polymer characterization.