Abstract Miniaturized ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) presents several advantages as portable chemical detection tools. They are fast, simple and inexpensive. However, the implementation of ion gates in miniaturized designs is difficult. Studies also showed that ion gates leads to electrostatic effects that negatively impacts the performance of IMS. This paper presents an alternative which eliminates ion gates by using the pulsating regimes of electrospray to generate small ion packets and a current-based measurement method to monitor drift times. A feedback loop was designed to control the number of pulsations generated by the electrospray. The results demonstrate that pulses of the axial spray mode I generate ion emissions of about 200 μs in ambient gas, which is comparable to conventional gating methods. The measured mobility is roughly 2.5 times higher than with conventional gating methods, so a new library of ion mobilities for this new method must be created for reference. The method presented is inexpensive and can be easily implemented in microfabricated IMS and similar devices.

中文翻译：

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离子迁移谱中离子门控的替代品

摘要 微型离子迁移谱仪 (IMS) 作为便携式化学检测工具具有多种优势。它们快速、简单且便宜。然而，在小型化设计中实施离子门是困难的。研究还表明，离子门会导致静电效应，从而对 IMS 的性能产生负面影响。本文提出了一种替代方案，它通过使用电喷雾的脉动机制来产生小离子包和一种基于电流的测量方法来监测漂移时间，从而消除了离子门。设计了一个反馈回路来控制电喷雾产生的脉动次数。结果表明，轴向喷雾模式 I 的脉冲在环境气体中产生约 200 μs 的离子发射，这与传统的门控方法相当。测得的迁移率大约为 2。比传统门控方法高 5 倍，因此必须为这种新方法创建一个新的离子迁移率库以供参考。所提出的方法价格低廉，可以很容易地在微制造 IMS 和类似设备中实施。