Rationale: Multiplexing ion mobility spectrometry with multiple ion injection pulses was used to achieve a high duty cycle and thus improve the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio while maintaining high resolving power compared with the traditional single-pulse signal averaging method. Historically, an ion mobility spectrum was reconstructed by various multiplexing methods including Fourier transform ion mobility spectrometry (FT-IMS), Hadamard transform ion mobility spectrometry (HT-IMS), and linear frequency modulation correlation ion mobility spectrometry (LFM-CIMS) sequence or Barker code.
Methods: To achieve an artifact-free multiplexing ion mobility spectrum, an almost perfect sequence (APS) with correlation technique was proposed to modulate the Bradbury-Nielson ion gate and was compared with FT-IMS, HT-IMS, LFM-IMS, and the traditional single-pulse signal averaging method.
Results: Experimental results showed that there are no artifact peaks in the APS-IMS spectra except an inverted mirror peak, and the S/N ratio was improved 5-8 times with a repetition time of 40-60 ms, corresponding to the improvement in the duty cycle. With the same duty cycle and similar acquisition time, APS-IMS showed a higher S/N ratio than HT-IMS for its unique autocorrelation response.
Conclusions: The APS-IMS technique offered a higher duty cycle and relatively shorter modulation period compared with reported multiplexing methods and is suitable to track rapidly changing signals without losing information and adding extra transformation artifact peaks.
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