What is ion mobility spectrometry used for?

What is ion mobility spectrometry used for?

Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is an analytical technique used to separate and identify ionized molecules in the gas phase based on their mobility in a carrier buffer gas.

What can be detected using ion mobility spectrometry?

IMS can detect almost anything that can be ionized and has been applied to the analysis from the lightest elements such as helium to the most complex mixtures such as proteomes, metabolomes and complete organisms such as bacteria, chiral separations, and structure determination.

How does IMS MS work?

MS detection provides a direct ability to determine parent ion structures, as well as fragmentation mechanisms, coming from the original molecular ion after the IMS. IMS is a separations instrument, and depending on what is used, as seen in Figures 1a and 1b, it provides low and high ion resolutions.

What effects ion mobility?

Ion mobility refers to the differential speeds at which ions migrate through a gas under the influence of an electric field. In addition to the effect of the ion’s mass and charge, its mobility is also influenced by shape making it possible, in some cases, to separate isomers.

What is IMS liquid?

Liquid IMS works on the same principle as gas phase IMS, the method of choice for the rapid detection of drugs and explosives. Because ions diffuse three orders of magnitude slower in liquids than in gases, real-time ion detection can take place in a miniaturized liquid phase IMS.

What is a Qtof?

Q-TOF mass spectrometers combine TOF and quadrupole instruments, a pairing that results in high mass accuracy for precursor and product ions, strong quantitation capability, and fragmentation experiment applicability.

What do you mean by ion mobility?

What is drift gas?

The drift gases chosen were helium, argon, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. These drift gases provide a range of polarizabilities and molecular weights.

What is ethanol IMS?

Denatured alcohol (CAS 64-17-5), also known as denatured ethanol or industrial methylated spirit (IMS), is ethanol (ethyl alcohol) to which has been added small known quantities of additional substances so as to ‘denature’ or adulterate it in a controlled manner.

What is ion mobility spectrometry (IMS)?

Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is the most commonly used technique in instruments for field presumptive analysis. IMS measures the mobility of ions accelerated by a constant electric field through a drift region to a detector.

What are the main components of ionic mass spectrometry?

Each one of them has its own advantages and disadvantages, but all of them use the main core component: gas-phase ions separation due to the presence of an electric field E. Each type of IMS has four main regions: sample introduction system; ionization area; drift tube (where separation or selection occurs) and detection area.

What are the four regions of an ion mobility spectrometer?

Each ion mobility spectrometer has up to four main regions that can be identified, as outlined in Figure 1, as: sample introduction system; ionization area; drift tube (where separation or selection occurs) and detection area.

What is the principle of ion mobility spectroscopy?

Ion-mobility spectrometry [248] relies on the difference of mobility of molecular ions drifting in an electric field in presence of an inert buffer gas [249–251]. In an ion-mobility cell, ions undergo a very large number of collisions and their collision cross-sections are dependent upon their geometrical structures.