New Mass Spectrometry Techniques for the Analysis of Polymers for Coatings Applications: MALDI and ESI

From a traditional perspective, mass spectrometry and polymer analysis appear to be incompatible. Mass spectrometry requires gas-phase ions for a successful analysis and polymers are composed of large, often entangled macromolecules that are not readily converted to gas-phase species. Despite these natural difficulties, mass spectrometry techniques have been developed to characterize the chemical structures of polymers that are of interest to the coatings community. Traditional mass spectrometry techniques developed for polymer analysis, like pyrolysis gas chromatography mass spectrometry (py-GC-MS) use thermal energy to vaporize nonvolatile samples. This thermal energy also decomposed the polymers into constituent parts. The full chemical structure information was lost.