DEVELOPMENT OF ION MASS SPECTROMETRY-BASED INSTRUMENTATION AND APPLICATIONS

Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is a technique that can rapidly separate ions based on their mobility in an inert buffer gas and provide insights to molecular structure. When coupled with mass spectrometry (MS), IM-MS offers a powerful hybrid analytical technique that has many biological, pharmaceutical, structural, environmental and other applications. During past decades, various types of IM-MS instruments have been built and applied, of which the most popular type is IMS-time of flight (TOF) MS. However, there are biological problems which require resolution higher than TOFMS can provide. The goal of my first project was to build a drift time IMS (DTIMS) and couple it with a commercial linear ion trap (LTQ) mass analyzer which can provide not only quick separation but also mass analysis capability. It can be used for analysis of complex biochemical samples and degradation mixtures for example. Furthermore, the IMS will be subsequently transferred to a LTQ Orbitrap-Velos MS to obtain mass data with high resolution and accuracy. \ud The second project focuses on the analysis of carbon nanotube (CNT) and graphene oxide (GO) degradation products using MS. In recent years different methods for carbon nanomaterial deg-radation have been developed and it is of interest to gain better understanding of the degradation process. MS is a suitable analysis method for the detection of intermediate mixtures with mole-cules of different molecular weight size. The objective of this project was to use MS and tandem MS data combined with other analytical techniques (e.g. nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR)) in order to identify and determine the structures of intermediate degradation products of CNT and GO, and understand degradation mechanisms.\u