Ardara Technologies has created a family of products for configuring our Nano-Electrospray ion source components into custom ESI-MS systems. All of the components were designed to be interchange-able modules for the ultimate in flexibility in customization.
The Ardara Technologies Nano-ESI ion source is configured as a flange mounted atmospheric pressure ionization source. The 8 inch ConFlat flange-mounted Nano-Electrospray ion source is mounted into a short nipple with integral skimmer exit aperture, the internal volume of which is pumped by a mechanical pump to around a torr operating pressure. Built into this robust nano-electrospray design is a stainless steel capillary for pressure reduction. |
The skimmer of the Nano-Electrospary ion source is concentrically aligned to an aluminum vacuum chamber, bringing the total number of pumping stages to four pressure regions, with three of those regions pumped by a split flow turbomolecular pump. A rectilinear quadrupole ion guide is used to collisionally damp the ion beam sampled from inside the skimmer through to a conductance limited exit aperture in the fourth stage. The fourth stage has symmetric 8 inch ConFlat flange ports on three sides as well as the top, providing the capability to bring the electrospray ions through to a wide variety of analyzer combinations. This flexible chamber design can also be configured with skimmers and no RF-only ion guide to maintain temporal resolution when sampling ions from an ion mobility system. |
Typical configurations utilize a quadrupole deflector energy filter to allow selective deflection of the electrospray ions in multiple directions, or to allow multiple ion sources share the same mass analyzer. To the right are shown a flange-mounted 20 mm quadrupole mass filter with jumbo cross beam ionizer and quadrupole deflector energy filter, and an orthogonal extraction TOF system, ready to insert into the side port of the Four-Stage Chamber. |