Development of simple drift tube design for ion mobility spectrometry based on flexible printed circuit board material

Nattapong Chantipmanee; Peter C Hauser

doi:10.1016/j.aca.2021.338626

Development of simple drift tube design for ion mobility spectrometry based on flexible printed circuit board material

Anal Chim Acta. 2021 Jul 25:1170:338626. doi: 10.1016/j.aca.2021.338626. Epub 2021 May 18.

Authors

Nattapong Chantipmanee¹, Peter C Hauser²

Affiliations

¹ University of Basel, Department of Chemistry, Klingelbergstrasse 80, 4056, Basel, Switzerland.
² University of Basel, Department of Chemistry, Klingelbergstrasse 80, 4056, Basel, Switzerland. Electronic address: Peter.Hauser@unibas.ch.

PMID: 34090588
DOI: 10.1016/j.aca.2021.338626

Abstract

A study on the use of flexible printed circuit board material for the construction of drift tubes for ion mobility spectrometry is reported. This is significantly less complicated than the conventional approach based on stacked electrode and insulator rings, as the material can simply be rolled up to obtain a string of circular electrodes. The size and spacing of the electrodes was found to have a strong effect on the resolving power. For an optimized geometry with electrodes of 1.5 mm width at a pitch of 3.5 mm resolving powers of up to 80 were achieved for quaternary amines introduced by electrospray ionization into a drift tube of 10 cm length and an applied voltage of 4200 V. This performance was found to be comparable to that of a conventional drift tube based on stacked rings with otherwise identical geometry and operating conditions. The entire instrument was constructed in-house. Its utility was demonstrated with the determination of the C12, C14 and C16 benzalkonium ions in several commercial cleaning products with limits of detection of 20, 25, and 38 μg L^-¹, respectively.

Keywords: Benzalkonium chloride; Drift tube ion mobility spectrometry; Flexible printed circuit board; Instrument design.