Ambient air contains a dynamic, complex mixture of volatile organic hydrocarbons (VOCs). These diverse gas-phase species are a crucial aspect of human interaction with the environment. Some VOCs harm human health or sensitive industrial processes, while the abundance and composition of other VOCs can be used as a chemical “fingerprint” to understand pollution sources, human exposure, and industrial quality control.
The Vocus chemical ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer (Vocus CI-TOF) is a robust, low-power, mobile instrument that measures VOCs in air in real time, addressing environmental and industrial problems not accessible by traditional mass spectrometry. Ambient air flows continuously into the instrument, where one of several soft CI techniques ionizes VOCs while excluding the main components of air. The Vocus ionization reactor uses radiofrequency ion guides to achieve extremely high sensitivity (sub-ppt LOD), and the TOF analyzer acquires complete mass spectra with resolving power up to 15000 (m/dm, FWHM). Data are typically reported with 100 millisecond to 1 minute time resolution.
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