
A military grade IMS (the Chemical Agent Monitor) demonstrates the utility
of IMS technology in rugged field conditions for life-critical applications.

Current research with modified IMS instruments detecting vapors from plastic and seedcotton
in a lab oven is discovering limits of detection and establishing neural network libraries.

Three boxes of electronics run the IMS, a fourth box contains the temperature controllers, and
a PCMCIA card in a PC provides the interface for instrument operation and spectra recording.

A collection of specta showing the differences with and without contaminating plastic.
Reactant ions form the large peak at left; product ions show up to its right.
Attempts to detect plastic contaminants in seed cotton are complicated by the volume and
velocity of conveying air (as much as 20,000 cfm at up to 68 miles per hour). Here off-
the shelf IMS instruments are tested at the USDA-ARS Southwestern Cotton Ginning Research Lab.

Earlier work with Gas Chromatography (GC) separated molecules by size before sampling with IMS.
This increased resolution but was too slow to achieve desired on-line contamination detection.
Earlier work with off-the-shelf IMS instruments designed for other applications confirmed that
plastic vapors can be detected, and that custom instrumentation is necessary for this application.

Three generations of IMS design illustrate reduction in size (and cost) from miniaturization.
Commercial devices are now available from:
Smiths Detection
and
Sionex Corporation
for certain applications.
Publications:
2008. Funk, P. A., Eiceman, G. A. White, C. R. and White, W. Laboratory
Detection of Plastics in Seedcotton with Ion Mobility Spectrometry. Journal of Cotton Science 12:237-245.
2003. Eiceman, G. A., Tarassov, A., Funk, P. A., Hughs, S. E., Nazarov, E.
G., and Miller, R. A. Discrimination of combustion fuel sources using gas
chromatography-planar field asymmetric-waveform ion mobility spectrometry.
J. Separation Sci. 26(6/7):585-593.
2002. Eiceman, G. A., Bergloff, J. F. and Funk, P. A. Comparison of Emission Profiles for Volatile Organic Compounds from Cotton and Polypropylene-based Tarp. Journal of Cotton Science 6:40-51.
2001. Eiceman, G. A., Tadjikov, B., Krylov, E., Nazarov, E. G., Miller, R.
A., Westbrook, J. and Funk, P. Miniature radio-frequency mobility analyzer
as a gas chromatographic detector. Oxygen-containing volatile organic
compounds, pheromones and other insect attractants. Journal of
Chromatography A. 917: 205-217.
Last updated 7 February 2009