Novel TOF-MS for Detection of Low Vapor Pressure Chemical and Biological Species

Aerosols contribute to a variety of environmental, biological, and industrial processes including air pollution. Nanomat, Inc proposes to build a novel Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (AMS) for monitoring of mass of the submicron chemical and organic species (TIC) with low vapor pressure. The device will have high sensitivity to determine mass of the particles extremely fast in real time. The proposed device will consist of the supersonic aerosol flow generator with an aerodynamic lens and high-duty-cycle Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer (TOF-MS) with the spiral quadrupole ion optics. The spiral quadrupole ion optics not only spiralize ion trajectories to make the TOF-MS shorter and lighter but simultaneously due to offset inlet realizes two channels for the ion packets and 98% duty cycle where no ions will be discarded. The deflector-modulator controlled by pseudo-random code generator with the jitter width-pulse modulation is bunching the continuous ion beam by switching ions and directs ion packets in two offset channels and ions of each channel impinge on own ion detectors. The overlapping signal spectra are deconvoluted separately in each channel. The expected mass resolution is better than 1,000 and sensitivity is less than 1ppb.