For the ionization of gaseous samples, most ion mobility spectrometers employ radioactive ionization sources, e.g., containing (63)Ni or (3)H. Besides legal restrictions, radioactive materials have the disadvantage of a constant radiation with predetermined intensity. In this work, we replaced the (3)H source of our previously described high-resolution ion mobility spectrometer with 75 mm drift tube length with a commercially available X-ray source. It is shown that the current configuration maintains the resolving power of R = 100 which was reported for the original setup containing a (3)H source. The main advantage of an X-ray source is that the intensity of the radiation can be adjusted by varying its operating parameters, i.e., filament current and acceleration voltage. At the expense of reduced resolving power, the sensitivity of the setup can be increased by increasing the activity of the source. Therefore, the performance of the setup can be adjusted to the specific requirements of any application. To investigate the relation between operating parameters of the X-Ray source and the performance of the ion mobility spectrometer, parametric studies of filament current and acceleration voltage are performed and the influence on resolving power, peak height, and noise is analyzed.

For future development of simple miniaturized sensors based on pulsed atmospheric pressure ionization as known from ion mobility spectrometry, we investigated the reaction kinetics of ion-ionrecombination to establish selective ion suppression as an easy to apply separation technique for otherwise non-selective ion detectors. Therefore, the recombination rates of different positive ion species, such as protonated water clusters H + (H 2 O) n (positive reactant ions), acetone, ammonia and dimethyl-methylphosphonate ions, all recombining with negative oxygen clusters O 2 À (H 2 O) n (negative reactant ions) in a field-free reaction region, are measured and compared. For all experiments, we use a drift tube ion mobility spectrometer equipped with a non-radioactive electron gun for pulsed atmospheric pressure ionization of the analytes. Both, ionization and recombination times are controlled by the duty cycle and repetition rate of the electron emission from the electron gun. Thus, it is possible to investigate the ion loss caused by ion-ion-recombination depending on the recombination time defined as the time delay between the end of the electron emission and the ion injection into the drift tube. Furthermore, the effect of the initial total ion density in the reaction region on the ion-ionrecombination rate is investigated by varying the density of the emitted electrons.

Ion mobility spectrometers (IMS) are devices for fast and very sensitive trace gas analysis. The measuring principle is based on an initial ionization process of the target analyte. Most IMS employ radioactive electron sources, such as Ni orH. These radioactive materials have the disadvantage of legal restrictions and the electron emission has a predetermined intensity and cannot be controlled or disabled. In this work, we replaced the H source of our IMS with 100 mm drift tube length with our nonradioactive electron source, which generates comparable spectra to theH source. An advantage of our emission current controlled nonradioactive electron source is that it can operate in a fast pulsed mode with high electron intensities. By optimizing the geometric parameters and developing fast control electronics, we can achieve very short electron emission pulses for ionization with high intensities and an adjustable pulse width of down to a few nanoseconds. This results in small ion packets at simultaneously high ion densities, which are subsequently separated in the drift tube. Normally, the required small ion packet is generated by a complex ion shutter mechanism. By omitting the additional reaction chamber, the ion packet can be generated directly at the beginning of the drift tube by our pulsed nonradioactive electron source with only slight reduction in resolving power. Thus, the complex and costly shutter mechanism and its electronics can also be omitted, which leads to a simple low-cost IMS-system with a pulsed nonradioactive electron source and a resolving power of 90.

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