Imaging of a tribolayer formed from ionic liquids by laser desorption/ionization-reflectron time-of-flight mass spectrometry.

For the first time, imaging using laser desorption/ionization (LDI) reflectron time-of-flight (RTOF) mass spectrometry (MS) was demonstrated to be a powerful tool for an offline monitoring of tribometrical experiments directly from disc specimen applying selected ammonium-, phosphonium-, and sulfonium-based ionic liquids (IL) with bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide as counterion for lubrication. The direct measurement of IL tribolayers by LDI-MS allowed the visualization of the lubricants in the form of the distribution of their intact cations and the anion in and outside the wear scar after the tribometrical experiment with a low degree of in-source generated fragmentation. Besides, also, an oxidation product formed during a tribometrical experiment was detected and located exclusively in the wear track. Comparative data of identical wear tracks were obtained by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) imaging not only enabling the determination of elemental distributions of the IL across the area imaged but also corroborating the mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) data, thus generating multimodal images. Merging data from MSI and XPS imaging exhibited that areas, where iron-fluorine bonds were detected in the wear track, are corresponding to data from LDI-MS imaging showing absence of IL cations and anions.