Science Behind the Innovation – The Ways to Better Sensitivity and Robustness In GC/MS Instrumentation

Andrey Rossin, Eldan Electronic Instruments , Petach-Tikva, Israel (AndreyR@eldan.biz)

Quadrupole GC/MS became the workhorse of almost any modern laboratory, the basic concept of the instrument did not change since its introduction in 1971.

But the instrument performance goes up and up every few years bringing better sensitivity, higher acquisition speed, smaller size and easier usability with every new GC/MS system released to the market.

The last few innovations in Agilent GC/MS systems were mainly concentrated on ion source that can produce more ions and stay clean for much longer period of time.

The R&D team had to overcome multiple challenges on their way to make this work as routine system. Ion beam had to be tamed to show good behavior in quadrupole analyzer.

Well-known industrial process of hydrogen reductive cleaning was adopted for automatic ion source cleaning routine.