Ionisation Techniques in Mass Spectrometry

Mass spectrometry in combination with chromatographic or electrophoretic pre-seperation steps is the most important technique for the detection and identification of organic compounds.

The development of methods for ionising species of interest under atmospheric-pressure conditions has enormously increased the analytical power of mass spectrometry and has allowed the direct determination of analytes present in various matrices. Quadrupole, ion-trap and time-of-flight (TOF) mass analyzers with electrospray ionisation (ESI) and atmospheric-pressure chemical ionisation (APCI) are already applied in routine analysis.

ESI and APCI are always used in combination with HPLC but we are trying to couple GCxGC with APCI- and APLI-TOF(MS) to realise new ionisation techniques, e.g. in metabolomic or petroleomic studies. In addition we combine several ionisation techniques such as ESI/APLI and ESI/APPI with HPLC to realise a cold ionisation method for the ionisation of thermal unstable compounds or chemicals with a high boiling point.

Because of our experience in laser ionization we are also testing several matrices for MALDI-TOF. The aim in this work is to ionise synthetic polymers and realise a semi-quantitative analysis of these.