Separation of Ions from Volatile Organic Compounds Using High-Field Asymmetric Waveform Ion Mobility Spectrometry-Mass Spectrometer

Abstract

A combination of high-field asymmetric waveform ion mobility spectrometry (FAIMS) with mass spectrometer (MS) was analyzed. FAIMS separates ions from the volatile organic compounds in the gas-phase as an ion-filter for MS. The sample ions were created at ambient pressure by ion source, which was equipped with a 10.6 eV UV discharge lamp (Å = 116.5 nm). The drift tube of FAIMS is composed of two parallel planar electrodes and the dimension is 10 mm × 8 mm × 0.5 mm. FAIMS was investigated when driven by the high-filed rectangular asymmetric waveform with the peak-to-peak voltage of 1.36 kV at the frequency of 1 MHz and the duty cycle of 30%. The acetone, the butanone, and their mixture were adopted to characterize the FAIMS-MS. The mass spectra obtained from MS illustrate that there are ion-molecular reactions between the ions and the sample neutral molecular. And the proton transfer behavior in the mixture of the acetone and the butanone is also observed. With the compensation voltage tuned from −30 V to 10 V with a step size of 0.1 V, the ion pre-separation before MS is realized.