Polyolefins such as polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) are often characterized from their pyrolysis products by Py-MS. Nowadays the development of plasma-based direct probe atmospheric pressure sources allow the direct analysis of these polymers. These sources operate at atmospheric pressure, which implies a limited control of the ionization conditions. It was shown that side reactions could occur with species present in air, such as O2, which may lead to the formation of oxidized compounds. In this work, ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) and Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FTICR) were used for the exhaustive characterization of the PP and PE pyrolysis ions produced using plasma-based atmospheric pressure ion sources. Both PP and PE yielded distributions of pyrolysis products presenting different amounts of unsaturation but also different numbers of oxygen atoms. In addition, the ions produced from PP presented a lower collision cross-section (CCS) than those produced from PE. In the same way, both PP and PE present repeated patterns separated by 14 m/z in the bidimensional drift time versus m/z plots. Within these plots, several trend lines can be evidenced, which are specific of each polymer investigated. Differences were observed between isotactic and atactic samples concerning the pyrolysis profile relative abundance and collision cross-section. Graphical Abstract ᅟ.
Keywords: ASAP; DP-APCI; Ion mobility; Isomer; Mass spectrometry; Plasma; Polyolefin.