[A novel gas chromatography detector based on ion mobility spectrometry technology and its application]

Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is an attractive detector of gas chromatography (GC) due to its high sensitivity, short response time, and comparatively low cost. The hyphenated GC-IMS instrument can simultaneously provide high separation ability of GC and high sensitivity of IMS. In this paper, one setup of a GC-IMS instrument is introduced. The parameters of IMS as the GC detector were evaluated and studied with respect to the resolution and sensitivity including temperature, total voltage and drift gas flow rate. Under the optimal conditions, GC-IMS was used to detect iodomethane, 1,2-dichloroethane, tetrachloromethane and dibromomethane and the detection limits were 2, 0.02, 1 and 0.1 ng, respectively. And the linear ranges of two orders of magnitude were achieved. As the detector of gas chromatography, IMS can provide more information for compound identification because of its second dimensional separation and can realize selective detection of different compounds.