Miniaturized Low-Cost Ion Mobility Spectrometer for Fast Detection of Chemical Warfare Agents

Abstract

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.

Experimental Comparison of Two Portable and Real-Time Size Distribution Analyzers for Nano/Submicron Aerosol Measurements

“…A portable and cheap SMPS with high-resolution suitable for the needs of atmospheric monitoring and occupational hygiene is required. One of the most important developments of a portable SMPS is to design a small differential mobility analyzer (DMA), which are mainly three types of DMA including radial (Hurd and Mullins, 1962;Zhang et al, 1995;Fissan et al, 1996;Qi et al, 2008;Brunelli et al, 2009), cylindrical (Babis et al, 2009He, 2014) and planar (Erikson, 1921;Knutson and Whitby, 1975;Spangler, 2000;Zimmermann et al, 2007Zimmermann et al, , 2008. The various manufacturers of commercial DMAs utilize similar dimensions (Steer et al, 2014).…”

Portable Planar DMA: Development and Tests

“…Due to the much higher mobility of ions, smaller drift regions are required, which greatly helps to facilitate miniaturization. Examples that have achieved this to such a degree as to be compatible with a handheld device include both planar (Spangler 2000;Zimmermann et al 2007Zimmermann et al , 2008 and cylindrical (Babis et al 2009) geometries. While interesting in their own right and useful for the applications they were designed for, none of these devices fit the requirements for a high-resolution portable device with a wide enough size range to cover most aerosol particle applications.…”

Detection performance of a portable ion mobility spectrometer with 63Ni radioactive ionization for chemical warfare agents

“…Aspiration types are also used in which the produced ions traverse the shutter with air fl ow, change direction according to the perpendicular drift voltage, and enter into several sensor cells depending on the size, shape, and charge of the molecules. Miniaturized aspiration condenser-type IMS machines have recently been developed [15]. High-fi eld asymmetric waveform IMS and differential mobility spectrometry are newly developed [16].…”