Study of Gaseous Sample Ionization by Excited Particles Formed in Glow Discharge Using High-Resolution Orthogonal Acceleration Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer

The experimental results of a mass spectral analysis of volatile organic compounds in a gaseous sample, obtained using an original design of an ion source based on the Penning ionization of a gas sample by excited metastable inert gas atoms, are presented. Using ANSYS software, a gas-dynamic simulation of reagent gas flow from discharge zone to ionization region was carried out to analyze the effect of gas flow profile on the transport of metastable atoms and ionization efficiency. The n -octane and toluene samples diluted with helium at 100 ppb mole concentrations were used for our experiments. The resulting mass spectra of n -octane and toluene samples containe far more intensive molecular ions in comparison to n -octane and toluene electron ionization mass spectra from the NIST database. The sensitivity of 5 ions per 1 pg and 130 ions per 1 pg was achieved for n -octane and toluene molecular ions using the developed ion source combined with our mass spectrometer. The corresponding detection limits are 2.3 pg s –1 for n-octane molecular ions and 0.08 pg s –1 for toluene molecular ions. The detection limit for the reported ion source was considered theoretically.