Bradbury-Nielsen-gate-grid structure for further enhancing the resolution of ion mobility spectrometry

In our previous work we proposed a three-zone theory for the Bradbury-Nielsen (BN) gate and proved with a grid-BN structure ion mobility drift tube that enhancements of the three-zone features led to higher resolutions and sometimes higher sensitivities. In this work we continued to seek further improvements of the resolution performance by adopting a BN-grid structure in the same drift tube. The postgate grid works both for confinement of the BN gate induced electric field and for isolation of the injection field from the drift field. This makes it possible to obtain better resolutions by further enhancing the compression electric field and lowering the injection field. It was found in the following experiments that reducing the injection field led to higher resolutions yet lower sensitivities. At an injection field of 140 V/cm, the inverse compression coefficient was found to be much larger than that in the grid-BN structure at all gating voltage differences (GVDs). At GVD = 350 V and a gate pulse width of 0.34 ms, the ion mobility spectrometry efficiency R(m)/R(c) reached as high as 221% in the BN-grid structure, presenting a further increase compared to 182% in the grid-BN structure. Finally, two examples are given to show the separation power improvements with good resolutions.