Mass Spectrometry and Mass Flow Control; A closer ion them

Mass Spectrometer

For many years, Mass Flow Controllers (MFCs) and Mass Flow Meters (MFMs) have been used in Analytical instrumentation. There are some distinctive applications like carrier gas control or mobile phase control in Gas Chromatography (GC) and Liquid Chromatography (LC). I discovered that there are a lot more applications of Mass Flow Controllers in analyzers then I could imagine when entering the world of Mass Flow Controllers after many years working in Analytical Chemistry.

One application I would like to focus on in this blog is Mass Spectrometry or shortly, as chemists like to use abbreviations, MS. Mass Spectrometry comes in many forms and is often coupled to Gas Chromatography and Liquid Chromatography. A Mass Spectrometer coupled to a Gas Chromatography (GC) is called a GC-MS and a Mass Spectrometer coupled to a Liquid Chromatography (LC) is called a LC-MS.

Where are Mass Spectrometers applied?

The market for Mass Spectrometers is huge and expanding. The instruments are used for Analytical Research in general but increasingly important in Food Research. Research concerning aging of whiskey and fingerprinting of red wine to determine the origin of the grapes are some examples. Another emerging market is Biopharmaceutical Research where Mass Spectrometers are used to study proteins and how these proteins are digested in living organisms. There are even Mass Spectrometers on Mars (!), where the martian soil is studied.

Schematic of mass spectrometer

What is a Mass Spectrometer?

The Mass Spectrometer is often compared with a weighing scale for molecules. Every molecule is built up from atoms and every atom has its own atomic mass and this is “weighted” by a Mass Spectrometer. Before it can weigh the different atoms that are present in one sample, the atoms have to be separated from each other. This is done by charging the atoms (to form ions) and using a magnet to deflect the path that the ion is following. The lighter the ion, the more influence the magnet has and the bigger the deflection. The detector detects where the ion hits and this is a measurement of the weight.

The place where the ionization takes place is called the ion source and there are a lot of different types of ion sources, depending on the matrix of the sample and on the ions that you want to form. The ionizing part is the most interesting part from a Mass Flow point of view because in this part different gases are used, depending on the technique of ionization.

Atmospheric pressure chemical ionization

There are two main techniques: hard ionization and soft ionization. With hard ionization techniques, molecules in the sample are heated and fragmented down to atomic levels giving information about the atomic structure of the molecule. With soft ionization techniques the molecule stays more intact giving mass information of the molecule. This is used in Food and Pharma research and has become very popular in the last decade.

Let’s look into detail to one of the most popular soft ionization techniques, the Electrospray Ion Source. The EIS vaporizes the liquid (coming from a Liquid Chromatograph, for example) by leading gas alongside a charged needle to form an aerosol spray. Leading a counter gas flow through the formed spray will evaporate most of the liquid that you do not want to measure, leaving the charged droplets going into the Mass Spectrometer.

Electrospray ionization (ESI)

Mass Flow Controllers and Evaporation used in Electrospray Ion source

The interesting part is that the flow needs to be very constant as you want the process of forming droplets and evaporating solvent to be the same, day after day and at different locations with different circumstances. An important parameter in this reproducibility is the gas flow. By using Mass Flow Controllers for Nebulizer gas and Evaporation or Drying gas, the ion source will always have reproducible gas flows.

Our solutions department can design compact gas modules for analytical applications to supply gases for ion-source combined with other gas flows with high accuracy and good reproducibility. Combining components like pressure switches and/or shut-off valves with the flow channels can give a compact gas handling module to fit in the small footprint demanding designs of the Mass Spectrometers. Furthermore, the changes on leaks are decreased significantly as the whole manifold can be leak and pressure tested before it is shipped to the customer.