Evaluation of a New Reagent-Ion Source and Focusing Ion-Molecule Reactor for Use in Proton-Transfer-Reaction Mass Spectrometry.

We evaluate the performance of a new chemical ionization source called Vocus, consisting of a discharge reagent-ion source and focusing ion-molecule reactor (FIMR) for use in proton-transfer-reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometry (PTR-TOF) measurements of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in air. The reagent ion source uses a low-pressure discharge. The FIMR consists of a glass tube with a resistive coating, mounted inside a radio frequency (RF) quadrupole. The axial electric field is used to enhance ion collision energies and limit cluster ion formation. The RF field focuses ions to the central axis of the reactor and improves the detection efficiency of product ions. Ion trajectory calculations demonstrate the mass-dependent focusing of ions and enhancement of the ion collision energy by the RF field, in particular for the lighter ions. Product ion signals are increased by a factor of 10 when the RF field is applied (5000-18 000 cps ppbv-1), improving measurement precision and detection limits while operating at very similar reaction conditions as traditional PTR instruments. Because of the high water mixing ratio in the FIMR, we observe no dependence of the sensitivity on ambient sample humidity. In this work, the Vocus is interfaced to a TOF mass analyzer with a mass resolving power up to 12 000, which allows clear separation of isobaric ions, observed at nearly every nominal mass when measuring ambient air. Measurement response times are determined for a range of ketones with saturation vapor concentrations down to 5 × 104 µg m-3 and compare favorably with previously published results for a PTR-MS instrument.

Impact of Thermal Decomposition on Thermal Desorption Instruments: Advantage of Thermogram Analysis for Quantifying Volatility Distributions of Organic Species.

We present results from a high-resolution chemical ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer (HRToF-CIMS), operated with two different thermal desorption inlets, designed to characterize the gas and aerosol composition. Data from two field campaigns at forested sites are shown. Particle volatility distributions are estimated using three different methods: thermograms, elemental formulas, and measured partitioning. Thermogram-based results are consistent with those from an aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) with a thermal denuder, implying that thermal desorption is reproducible across very different experimental setups. Estimated volatilities from the detected elemental formulas are much higher than from thermograms since many of the detected species are thermal decomposition products rather than actual SOA molecules. We show that up to 65% of citric acid decomposes substantially in the FIGAERO-CIMS, with ∼20% of its mass detected as gas-phase CO2, CO, and H2O. Once thermal decomposition effects on the detected formulas are taken into account, formula-derived volatilities can be reconciled with the thermogram method. The volatility distribution estimated from partitioning measurements is very narrow, likely due to signal-to-noise limits in the measurements. Our findings indicate that many commonly used thermal desorption methods might lead to inaccurate results when estimating volatilities from observed ion formulas found in SOA. The volatility distributions from the thermogram method are likely the closest to the real distributions.

Formation of Low Volatility Organic Compounds and Secondary Organic Aerosol from Isoprene Hydroxyhydroperoxide Low-NO Oxidation.

Gas-phase low volatility organic compounds (LVOC), produced from oxidation of isoprene 4-hydroxy-3-hydroperoxide (4,3-ISOPOOH) under low-NO conditions, were observed during the FIXCIT chamber study. Decreases in LVOC directly correspond to appearance and growth in secondary organic aerosol (SOA) of consistent elemental composition, indicating that LVOC condense (at OA below 1 µg m(-3)). This represents the first simultaneous measurement of condensing low volatility species from isoprene oxidation in both the gas and particle phases. The SOA formation in this study is separate from previously described isoprene epoxydiol (IEPOX) uptake. Assigning all condensing LVOC signals to 4,3-ISOPOOH oxidation in the chamber study implies a wall-loss corrected non-IEPOX SOA mass yield of ∼4%. By contrast to monoterpene oxidation, in which extremely low volatility VOC (ELVOC) constitute the organic aerosol, in the isoprene system LVOC with saturation concentrations from 10(-2) to 10 µg m(-3) are the main constituents. These LVOC may be important for the growth of nanoparticles in environments with low OA concentrations. LVOC observed in the chamber were also observed in the atmosphere during SOAS-2013 in the Southeastern United States, with the expected diurnal cycle. This previously uncharacterized aerosol formation pathway could account for ∼5.0 Tg yr(-1) of SOA production, or 3.3% of global SOA.

Experimental determination of the partitioning coefficient of ß-pinene oxidation products in SOAs.

The composition of secondary organic aerosols (SOAs) formed by ß-pinene ozonolysis was experimentally investigated in the Juelich aerosol chamber. Partitioning of oxidation products between gas and particles was measured through concurrent concentration measurements in both phases. Partitioning coefficients (Kp) of 2.23 × 10(-5) ± 3.20 × 10(-6) m(3) µg(-1) for nopinone, 4.86 × 10(-4) ± 1.80 × 10(-4) m(3) µg(-1) for apoverbenone, 6.84 × 10(-4) ± 1.52 × 10(-4) m(3) µg(-1) for oxonopinone and 2.00 × 10(-3) ± 1.13 × 10(-3) m(3) µg(-1) for hydroxynopinone were derived, showing higher values for more oxygenated species. The observed Kp values were compared with values predicted using two different semi-empirical approaches. Both methods led to an underestimation of the partitioning coefficients with systematic differences between the methods. Assuming that the deviation between the experiment and the model is due to non-ideality of the mixed solution in particles, activity coefficients of 4.82 × 10(-2) for nopinone, 2.17 × 10(-3) for apoverbenone, 3.09 × 10(-1) for oxonopinone and 7.74 × 10(-1) for hydroxynopinone would result using the vapour pressure estimation technique that leads to higher Kp. We discuss that such large non-ideality for nopinone could arise due to particle phase processes lowering the effective nopinone vapour pressure such as diol- or dimer formation. The observed high partitioning coefficients compared to modelled results imply an underestimation of SOA mass by applying equilibrium conditions.

Improved resolution of hydrocarbon structures and constitutional isomers in complex mixtures using gas chromatography-vacuum ultraviolet-mass spectrometry.

Understanding the composition of complex hydrocarbon mixtures is important for environmental studies in a variety of fields, but many prevalent compounds cannot be confidently identified using traditional gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) techniques. This work uses vacuum-ultraviolet (VUV) ionization to elucidate the structures of a traditionally "unresolved complex mixture" by separating components by GC retention time, t(R), and mass-to-charge ratio, m/z, which are used to determine carbon number, N(C), and the number of rings and double bonds, N(DBE). Constitutional isomers are resolved on the basis of t(R), enabling the most complete quantitative analysis to date of structural isomers in an environmentally relevant hydrocarbon mixture. Unknown compounds are classified in this work by carbon number, degree of saturation, presence of rings, and degree of branching, providing structural constraints. The capabilities of this analysis are explored using diesel fuel, in which constitutional isomer distribution patterns are shown to be reproducible between carbon numbers and follow predictable rules. Nearly half of the aliphatic hydrocarbon mass is shown to be branched, suggesting branching is more important in diesel fuel than previously shown. The classification of unknown hydrocarbons and the resolution of constitutional isomers significantly improves resolution capabilities for any complex hydrocarbon mixture.

Characterization of primary organic aerosol emissions from meat cooking, trash burning, and motor vehicles with high-resolution aerosol mass spectrometry and comparison with ambient and chamber observations.

Organic aerosol (OA) emissions from motor vehicles, meat-cooking and trash burning are analyzed here using a high-resolution aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS). High resolution data show that aerosols emitted by combustion engines and plastic burning are dominated by hydrocarbon-like organic compounds. Meat cooking and especially paper burning emissions contain significant fractions of oxygenated organic compounds; however, their unit-resolution mass spectral signatures are very similar to those from ambient hydrocarbon-like OA, and very different from the mass spectra of ambient secondary or oxygenated OA (OOA). Thus, primary OA from these sources is unlikelyto be a significant direct source of ambient OOA. There are significant differences in high-resolution tracer m/zs that may be useful for differentiating some of these sources. Unlike in most ambient spectra, all of these sources have low total m/z 44 and this signal is not dominated by the CO2+ ion. All sources have high m/z 57, which is low during high OOA ambient periods. Spectra from paper burning are similar to some types of biomass burning OA, with elevated m/z 60. Meat cooking aerosols also have slightly elevated m/z 60, whereas motor vehicle emissions have very low signal at this m/z.

O/C and OM/OC ratios of primary, secondary, and ambient organic aerosols with high-resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometry.

A recently developed method to rapidly quantify the elemental composition of bulk organic aerosols (OA) using a high-resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometer (HR-ToF-AMS) is improved and applied to ambient measurements. Atomic oxygen-to-carbon (O/C) ratios characterize the oxidation state of OA, and O/C from ambient urban OA ranges from 0.2 to 0.8 with a diurnal cycle that decreases with primary emissions and increases because of photochemical processing and secondary OA (SOA) production. Regional O/C approaches approximately 0.9. The hydrogen-to-carbon (H/C, 1.4--1.9) urban diurnal profile increases with primary OA (POA) as does the nitrogen-to-carbon (N/C, approximately 0.02). Ambient organic-mass-to-organic-carbon ratios (OM/OC) are directly quantified and correlate well with O/C (R2 = 0.997) for ambient OA because of low N/C. Ambient O/C and OM/OC have values consistent with those recently reported from other techniques. Positive matrix factorization applied to ambient OA identifies factors with distinct O/C and OM/OC trends. The highest O/C and OM/OC (1.0 and 2.5, respectively) are observed for aged ambient oxygenated OA, significantly exceeding values for traditional chamber SOA,while laboratory-produced primary biomass burning OA (BBOA) is similar to ambient BBOA, O/C of 0.3--0.4. Hydrocarbon-like OA (HOA), a surrogate for urban combustion POA, has the lowest O/C (0.06--0.10), similar to vehicle exhaust. An approximation for predicting O/C from unit mass resolution data is also presented.

Field-deployable, high-resolution, time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometer.

The development of a new high-resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometer (HR-ToF-AMS) is reported. The high-resolution capabilities of this instrument allow the direct separation of most ions from inorganic and organic species at the same nominal m/z, the quantification of several types of organic fragments (CxHy, CxHyOz, CxHyNp, CxHyOzNp), and the direct identification of organic nitrogen and organosulfur content. This real-time instrument is field-deployable, and its high time resolution (0.5 Hz has been demonstrated) makes it well-suited for studies in which time resolution is critical, such as aircraft studies. The instrument has two ion optical modes: a single-reflection configuration offers higher sensitivity and lower resolving power (up to approximately 2100 at m/z 200), and a two-reflectron configuration yields higher resolving power (up to approximately 4300 at m/z 200) with lower sensitivity. The instrument also allows the determination of the size distributions of all ions. One-minute detection limits for submicrometer aerosol are <0.04 microg m(-3) for all species in the high-sensitivity mode and <0.4 microg m(-3) in the high-resolution mode. Examples of ambient aerosol data are presented from the SOAR-1 study in Riverside, CA, in which the spectra of ambient organic species are dominated by CxHy and CxHyOz fragments, and different organic and inorganic fragments at the same nominal m/z show different size distributions. Data are also presented from the MIRAGE C-130 aircraft study near Mexico City, showing high correlation with independent measurements of surrogate aerosol mass concentration.

Duty cycle and modulation efficiency of two-channel Hadamard transform time-of-flight mass spectrometry.

Hadamard transform time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HT-TOFMS) is based on the pseudorandom gating of ion packets into a time-of-flight mass-to-charge analyzer. In its typical implementation, the technique is able to monitor continuous ion sources with a 50% duty cycle, independent of all other figures of merit. Recently, we have demonstrated that the duty cycle can be extended to 100% using patterned, two-channel detection. Two-channel HT-TOFMS involves the simultaneous optimization of paired one-channel experiments and imposes more stringent conditions to achieve high-quality spectra. An ion modulation device, known as Bradbury-Nielson Gate (BNG), is central to HT-TOFMS. It is an ideal deflection plate, capable of transmitting or deflecting an ion beam according to a known binary sequence without changing the times-of-flight of the ions. Analytical equations are derived that accurately describe the ion modulation process of the BNG as confirmed by good agreement with SimIon simulations and ion beam imaging experiments. From these expressions, the duty cycle and ion modulation efficiency were calculated for various BNG parameters, ion beam characteristics, and detector dimensions, which permit the optimum conditions to be chosen for the two-channel experiment. We conclude that the outer detector should be three times the maximum deflection angle to detect all deflected ions (100% duty cycle) and that the difference between the modulated ion counts in the sequence elements 0 and 1 should be maximized to achieve high modulation efficiency. This condition is best achieved by tight focusing of the ion beam in the center of the inner detector. When both channels are optimized, the two-channel advantage can be exploited to achieve a further improvement over a single-channel experiment.

A soft on-column metal coating procedure for robust sheathless electrospray emitters used in capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry.

An on-column metal coating procedure was developed for sheathless electrospray emitters, based on Justus von Liebig's electroless silver mirror reaction followed by electrochemical deposition of gold onto the silver layer. The coating procedure is straightforward, mild, inexpensive, and can be performed with standard laboratory equipment. A long-term (600 h) stability investigation of the conductive coating was carried out by continuous electrospray in the positive electrospray mode, and no degradation in performance was found. The simplicity of the coating procedure and the robustness of the spray tips makes the spray tips highly suitable to couple delicate wall-coated or monolithic capillary columns to mass spectrometry. Peptide mixtures were separated by capillary electrophoresis and injected into either a Hadamard-transform time-of-flight mass analyzer or a commercial quadrupole mass analyzer using the described sheathless electrospray emitters. The performance was judged to be excellent.

Effects of modulation defects on Hadamard transform time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HT-TOFMS).

In any Hadamard multiplexing technique, discrepancies between the intended and the applied encoding sequences may reduce the intensity of real spectral features and create discrete, artificial signals. In our implementation of Hadamard transform time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HT-TOFMS), the encoding sequence is applied to the ion beam by means of an interleaved comb of wires (Bradbury-Nielson gate), which shutters the ion beam on and off. By isolating and exaggerating individual skewing effects in simulating the HT-TOFMS process, we determined the nature of errors that arise from various defects. In particular, we find that the most damaging defects are: mismatched voltages between the wire sets and the acceleration voltage of the instrument, which cause positive and negative peaks throughout mass spectra; insufficient deflection voltage, which reduces the intensity of real peaks and causes negative peaks that are spread across the entire mass range; and voltage errors as the wire sets return from their deflection voltage to their transmission value, which yield significant reductions in peak intensities, create artificial peaks throughout mass spectra, and broaden real peaks by causing positive peaks to grow in the bins adjacent to them. Because the magnitude of the modulation defects grows as the applied modulation voltage is increased, Bradbury-Nielson gates with finer wire spacing, and hence stronger effective fields for a given applied voltage, were produced and installed. Operating at 10 to 15 V where errors in the electronics are essentially absent, the most finely spaced gate (100 microm) yielded signal-to-noise ratios that were more than two times higher than those achieved with more widely spaced gates. As an alternative method for minimizing skewing effects, HT-TOFMS data were post processed using an exact knowledge of the modulation defects. Nonbinary matrices that mimic the actual encoding process were built by measuring voltage versus time traces and then translating these traces to transmission versus time. Use of these matrices in the deconvolution step led to marked improvements in spectral resolution but require full knowledge of the encoding defects.

Hadamard transform time-of-flight mass spectrometry: more signal, more of the time.

Hadamard transform time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HT-TOF MS) is a type of mass analysis that was developed to couple continuous ion sources to the inherently pulsed nature of time-of-flight measurements. Unlike conventional TOF MS, the Hadamard transform method offers a duty cycle of 50%, with the possibility of extending it to 100%. Because it is a multiplexing technique, the attainable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is also significantly higher than that of conventional TOF MS. This review covers the basic principles behind HT-TOF MS. We illustrate, through examples, the source of the high-duty cycle and the increase in SNR. These features translate to a mass spectral storage rate that is the fastest among similar instruments, which enables its use as a detector for high-speed separations.

Hadamard transform time-of-flight mass spectrometry: a high-speed detector for capillary-format separations.

This work demonstrates that with an intrinsic duty cycle of 50% and spectral storage speeds up to 277 spectra s(-1) Hadamard transform time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HT-TOFMS) is a promising detector for any capillary-format separation that can be coupled to MS by electrospray ionization. Complete resolution of the components of a nine-peptide standard was achieved by coupling pressurized-capillary electrophoresis (pCE) to HT-TOFMS. The addition of pressure to the separation capillary decreased analysis times and stabilized the electrospray ionization source. Pulsed-pressurized injection of reserpine was used to experimentally simulate narrower peaks than those obtained in the pCE. HT-TOFMS was able to sample peaks having widths in the millisecond range.