Towards a hand-held, fast, and sensitive gas chromatograph-ion mobility spectrometer for detecting volatile compounds.

Ion mobility spectrometers can detect gaseous compounds at atmospheric pressure in the range of parts per trillion within a second. Due to their fast response times, high sensitivity, and limited instrumental effort, they are used in a variety of applications, especially as mobile or hand-held devices. However, most real-life samples are gas mixtures, which can pose a challenge for IMS with atmospheric pressure chemical ionization mainly due to competing gas-phase ionization processes. Therefore, we present a miniaturized drift tube IMS coupled to a compact gas chromatograph for pre-separation, built of seven bundled standard GC columns (Rtx-Volatiles, Restek GmbH) with 250 μm ID and 1.07 m in length. Such pre-separation significantly reduces chemical cross sensitivities caused by competing gas-phase ionization processes and adds orthogonality. Our miniaturized GC-IMS system is characterized with alcohols, halocarbons, and ketones as model substances, reaching detection limits down to 70 pptv with IMS averaging times of just 125 ms. It separates test mixtures of ketones and halocarbons within 180 s and 50 s, respectively. The IMS has a short drift length of 40.6 mm and reaches a high resolving power of RP = 68. Graphical abstract.