A high-transmission axial ion mobility classifier for mass–mobility measurements of atmospheric ions

Abstract

We present an electrical mobility classifier for mass–mobility measurements of atmospheric ions. Size segregation coupled with mass spectrometric detection of naturally occurring ions in the atmosphere is challenging due to the low ion concentration. Conventional electrical mobility classifying devices were not yet coupled with mass spectrometry to resolve natural ion composition. This is due to either the insufficient transmission efficiency or design concepts being incompatible with this application, e.g. using high electric fields close to the inlets to push ions from high to low electric potential. Here, we introduce an axial ion mobility classifier, termed AMC, with the aim to achieve higher transmission efficiencies to segregate natural ions at reasonable sizing resolution. Similar to the recently introduced principle of the high-pass electrical mobility filter (HP-EMF) presented by Bezantakos et al. (2015) and Surawski et al. (2017), ions are classified via an electric field that is opposed to the gas flow direction carrying the ions. Compared to the HP-EMF concept, we make use of sheath flows to improve the size resolution in the sub-3 nm range. With our new design we achieve a sizing resolution of 7 $Z/\mathrm{\Delta }Z$ with a transmission efficiency of about 70 %.