Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is a well-known method for detecting hazardous compounds in air. Typical applications are the detection of chemical warfare agents, highly toxic industrial compounds, explosives, and drugs of abuse. Detection limits in the low part per billion range, fast response times, and simple instrumentation make this technique more and more popular. In particular, there is an increasing demand for miniaturized low-cost IMS for hand-held devices and air monitoring of public areas by sensor networks. In this paper, we present a miniaturized aspiration condenser type ion mobility spectrometer for fast detection of chemical warfare agents. The device is easy to manufacture and allows single substance identification down to low part per billion-level concentrations within seconds. The improved separation power results from ion focusing by means of geometric constraints and fluid dynamics. A simple pattern recognition algorithm is used for the identification of trained substances in air. The device was tested at the German Armed Forces Scientific Institute for Protection Technologies-NBC-Protection. Different chemical warfare agents, such as sarin, tabun, soman, US-VX, sulfur mustard, nitrogen mustard, and lewisite were tested. The results are presented here.

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Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is a well-known method for detecting hazardous compounds in air. Typical applications are the detection of chemical warfare agents, highly toxic industrial compounds, explosives, and drugs of abuse. Detection limits in the low part per billion range, fast response times, and simple instrumentation make this technique more and more popular. Common ion mobility spectrometers work by employing a radioactive source to provide electrons with high energy to ionize analytes in a series of chemical reactions. General security as well as regulatory concerns related to radioactivity result in the need for a different ionization source which on the other hand produces ions in a similar manner as a radioactive source since the ion chemistry is well-known. Here we show the application of a novel nonradioactive source that produces spectra similar to those obtained with radioactive tritium sources. Using this source in a pulsed mode offers the additional advantage of selecting certain analytes by their recombination time and thus significantly increasing the selectivity. The successful isolation of a target signal in the presence of contaminants using a pulsed electron beam or more precisely the difference in recombination times will be demonstrated for the case of dimethyl-methylphosphonate (DMMP) showing the potential of this source to reduce the possibility for false-positive detection of corresponding chemical warfare agents (CWA) by IMS.

Typical ion mobility spectrometers work by employing a radioactive source to provide electrons with high energy to ionize the analytes in a series of chemical reactions. General security as well as regulatory concerns related to the use of radioactivity resulted in a need for a different ionization source which on the other hand produces ions in a similar manner as a radioactive source because the mechanisms are well known. Here we introduce a novel non-radioactive electron source which is capable of providing high energy electrons in a way that is similar to beta radiating substances yielding correspondingly similar peak spectra.