Atmospheric-Pressure Dielectric Barrier Discharge as an Elemental Ion Source for Gas Chromatographic Analysis of Organochlorines.
Kunyu ZhengMichael J DolanPeter J HaferlHamid BadieiKaveh JorabchiPublished in: Analytical chemistry (2018)
Atmospheric-pressure dielectric barrier discharge (AP-DBD) plasma has emerged in recent years as a versatile plasma for molecular ionization and elemental spectroscopy. However, its capabilities as an elemental ion source have been less explored, partly because of difficulties in the detection of positive elemental ions from this low-gas-temperature plasma. In this work, we investigate the detection of negative elemental ions to enable elemental mass spectrometry (MS) using AP-DBD. A gas chromatograph is coupled to a helium AP-DBD apparatus and positioned in front of an atmospheric-pressure-sampling mass spectrometer with no modifications to the ion sampling interface. We demonstrate that Cl- ions are detected with a compound-independent efficiency, enabling elemental quantification of organochlorines. Further, addition of oxygen at low concentration (11 ppm, v/v) to the helium plasma improves the analytical performance by reducing postcolumn peak broadening, whereas high oxygen concentrations (>110 ppm, v/v) lead to loss of the compound-independent response. The optimized GC-AP-DBD-MS setup shows close to 2 orders of magnitude of linearity for its compound-independent Cl response and offers detection limits of 0.5-1 pg of Cl on column (0.6 pg/s), suitable for analysis of organochlorines in food samples. We demonstrate this capability by analyzing orange juice spiked with pesticides at 9 μg/L and a single internal standard. Importantly, we demonstrate that a quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, and safe (QuEChERS) extraction followed by GC-AP-DBD-MS quantification using the single standard provides acceptable recoveries (80-120%). These results highlight uniform QuEChERS extraction of a range of compounds and the compound-independent response of AP-DBD for Cl, making the combination of the two methods desirable for the rapid quantification of organochlorines. Furthermore, we discuss ionization matrix effects in AP-DBD for chlorine detection and offer strategies to flag matrix-impacted analytes. These results suggest that AP-DBD has the potential to become a unified ion source for both elemental quantification and molecular identification of GC eluents on a single MS platform.
Keyphrases
- mass spectrometry
- gas chromatography
- transcription factor
- liquid chromatography
- ms ms
- loop mediated isothermal amplification
- tandem mass spectrometry
- high resolution mass spectrometry
- high resolution
- multiple sclerosis
- high performance liquid chromatography
- simultaneous determination
- label free
- particulate matter
- gas chromatography mass spectrometry
- real time pcr
- ultra high performance liquid chromatography
- carbon dioxide
- liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry
- room temperature
- risk assessment
- single molecule
- solid phase extraction
- aqueous solution
- air pollution
- human health
- high throughput
- solid state
- water soluble
- sensitive detection