THE AXIAL SPRAY MODE I AS A SOLUTION FOR MINIATURIZED ION MOBILITY SPECTROMETRY by

Miniaturized ion mobility spectrometers present several advantages as portable chemical detection tools. They are fast, simple and inexpensive. However, they still suffer from low resolving power and hard implementation of ion gates in micro scale designs. Even in examples where they are successfully combined, ion gates cause dispersion, compression, and depletion effects that result in ion packets than are wider than desired. This thesis describes an alternative gating method that is free of ion gates and that can be used in liquid phase ion mobility spectrometry (LPIMS), a technique where conventional ion gates are currently unsuitable. A parametric study shows that the method proposed has the potential to achieve resolving powers comparable to macro scale designs if successfully coupled to LPIMS. Observations relating the maximum meniscus height to current measurements are presented and are of particular interest to E-jet printing and similar techniques.