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Updated: Jun 26, 2025

Capturing Actively Produced Microbial Volatile Organic Compounds from Human-Associated Samples with Vacuum-Assisted Sorbent Extraction
Published on: June 1, 2022
Portable Mass Spectrometry for On-site Detection of Hazardous Volatile Organic Compounds via Robotic Extractive
Ximeng Liu1, Qiaoyun Huang1, Jiewei Deng2
1College of Environment and Climate, Institute of Mass Spectrometry and Atmospheric Environment, Guangdong Provincial Engineering Research Center for On-line Source Apportionment System of Air Pollution, and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Speed Capability Research, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China.
Abstract:
Various hazardous volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are frequently released into environments during accidental events that cause many hazards to ecosystems and humans. Therefore, rapid, sensitive, and on-site detection of hazardous VOCs is crucial to understand their compositions, characteristics, and distributions in complex environments. However, manual handling of hazardous VOCs remains a challenging task, because of the inaccessible environments and health risk. In this work, we designed a quadruped robotic sampler to reach different complex environments for capturing trace hazardous VOCs using a needle trap device (NTD) by remote manipulation. The captured samples were rapidly identified by portable mass spectrometry (MS) within minutes. Rapid detection of various hazardous VOCs including toxicants, chemical warfare agents, and burning materials from different environments was successfully achieved using this robot-MS system. On-site detection of 83 typical hazardous VOCs was examined. Acceptable analytical performances including low detection limits (at subng/mL level), good reproducibility (relative standard deviation (RSD) < 20%, n = 6), excellent quantitative ability (R2 > 0.99), and detection speed (within minutes) were also obtained. Our results show that the robot-MS system has excellent performance including safety, controllability, applicability, and robustness under dangerous chemical conditions.
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