Miniature, Mobile and Ruggedized Mass Spectrometer for Real-Time Monitoring and Detection of Chemical Vapors and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC's)

The need to ef?ciently collect, transport, and identify vapors in real-time remains imperative and crucial to chemical defense, security, public safety, and forensic science sectors, as well as areas including environmental and pollution monitoring. Instrumentation that can quickly detect, identify, and quantitate a large variety of chemical species with high accuracy, chemical selectivity, and sensitivity to trace amounts of analyte in complex vapor is needed for the above applications.  With the support of STTR grants (phases I and II) from Edgewood Chemical-Biological Command (ECBC) (now Combat Capability Development Command, Chemical Biological Center (CCDC/CBC) and the company’s own private funding, BaySpec has developed and commercialized a ?eld-deployable, man-portable mass spectrometer capable of continuous sampling with a throughput time as fast as 0.1s.  Also, through previous efforts supported by the U.S. Army and DARPA, BaySpec developed prototype ionization sources compatible with vapor detection using the BaySpec Continuity, a portable linear-ion-trap mass spectrometer, and also developed the capability to detect compounds at low (