SBIR Phase I: Low cost, portable mass spectrometers based on a chip-scale ion trap mass analyzer

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The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to greatly expand the power of mass spectrometry for chemical detection and analysis to a far broader user base. The ultimate goal is to produce a chip-scale device sufficiently affordable that it can be a user replaceable component in an ultra-compact instrument. This is enabled by a microfabricatable ion trap geometry that circumvents key shortcomings of previous chip-scale mass analyzer efforts. There is potential to bring this technology to the consumer market where it can inform household residents of harmful trace or odorless chemicals present in their homes. In addition, with advances in data science, the proposed technology might also be able to inform household residents of volatile organic compound signatures that may be indicative of the early onset of disease in a manner similar to dogs which have a demonstrated ability to smell certain types of cancer, Parkinson’s disease, spiking or dropping blood sugar levels in diabetics, and, most topically, CoVID-19, among other conditions. Prior to entry into the consumer market, these compact instruments can be leveraged for important in-situ analytics in fields such as defense, energy production, pharmaceutical research, environmental monitoring, and space exploration. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will enable the assessment of a novel, patent-pending ion trap mass analyzer in a compact physics package for handheld mass spectrometers. Mass spectrometers are the gold standard for chemical analysis and have wide ranging applications, however, widespread utilization of these powerful instruments is hindered by their high cost, size, weight, and power. Current portable instruments are ~$100k USD, roughly the size of a small suitcase, and operate for only a few hours on a single battery charge. The novel ion trap mass analyzer geometry explored as part of this work can be microfabricated, potentially lowering the cost per unit to the point where it can be incorporated in an instrument physics package that is a replaceable cartridge, thus eliminating the need for expert maintenance. Coupled with modern computational methods, processing power, and cloud computing architectures, these mass spectrometers could be utilized for chemical analysis applications for which mass spectrometry is currently not a cost-effective solution. This dream of ubiquitous, high specificity chemical analysis technology could generate massive amounts of new raw data informing and creating future collective research and advanced applications/solutions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.