Field Portable Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

The emergence of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) fabrication techniques is prevalent in modern electronics, personal communications systems and many other everyday devices that continually become smaller and more capable. Mass spectrometry (MS) (Fox J, Saini R, Tsui K, Verbeck G, Rev Sci Instrum 80(9):93302–93306, 2009), too has benefited from these fabrication techniques and as a result, there has been an increased focus on instrument miniaturization and field portability. Much of the effort in this area has been in the miniaturization of the mass analyzer where even micron-sized analyzers have been reported. However, the miniaturization of the mass analyzer is not the only barrier to system size reduction. Much of the support hardware (pumping systems, ionization sources, detectors, etc.) has not scaled proportionally, either in size or operational capability. Often the batteries are the largest/heaviest components in a miniature system and, despite improvements in battery technologies, power is still a major limitation for field portability. In addition to MS hardware, the methods for sample acquisition, processing and introduction must be reduced with respect to complexity, size and power requirements while still maintaining sufficient analytical efficiency for adequate detection specifications. Finally, the systems must be easy to use by non-expert operators. All of these analytical figures of merit interplay in such a way that significant tradeoffs must be made when designing a field-portable instrument for a particular application.

The three talks presented at the 2013 NATO Advanced Studies Institute in Sienna Italy and summarized in this chapter cover the progress and obstacles in miniaturization of MS components as well as the interdependencies of the instrumental figures of merit, analytical performance and field applications as they pertain to field-portable miniature MS. The talks included examples from the speakers’ past and current fieldable instrument development projects.