Portable Mass Spectrometer System for Dangerous Air Emissions Monitoring

Routine, fully automated analysis of air, water, soils, sludge, etch., would help target clean-up efforts and improve worker safety in the field. The availability of highly portable and affordable chemical analyzers would allow widespread deployment, which has been unobtainable with traditional instrumentation presently used for this evaluation. However, we propose a system employing state-of-the-art mass analyzers, vacuum, power sources, and electronics, forming a computer controlled, highly portable mass spectrometer system. The modularity of the system provides design flexibility, including self contained systems specialized for unattended remote sensing (weighing a few hundred pounds with power source), to ultra compact, spot checking units (or personal exposure monitors) weighing only a few pounds. Mass spectrometer sensing capabilities (in the parts per billion), coupled with computer analysis of the data and comparison of the spectra to fingerprint database libraries for chemical identification would provide unsurpassed, real time, in-field sensing capabilities.