PFI-TT: Molecular Identification of Chemical Substances with a Multi-stage Analyzer

该PFI项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力随着人类了解空气中蒸汽和其他可能含有某种毒性或危险物质的材料的化学成分的能力增强而产生。 改进了称为离子迁移谱法的化学测量方法的原则和做法，该方法已经为商业航空提供了爆炸物探测安全，并为军事准备监测化学战剂提供了安全。 该项目的创新将通过从物质中提取更多知识来提高检测化学品的信心，从而推动测量技术的发展。 这些改进将使需要高速便携式化学分析仪的专家和社会广泛受益，当这种分析仪用于安全，医疗和消费应用时。 技术的革新需要对气体离子等物质在强电场中的行为进行探索和研究。 对这些行为的理解应该会对化学测量科学和其他物理科学产生影响，而不仅仅是这种特定的技术。拟议的项目解决了现有的基于离子迁移谱的化学分析仪的关键限制，这些分析仪只能进行高选择性检测，无法提供准确的物质化学鉴定。 本项目的目标是在离子迁移谱的小平面实施例中使用来自物质的气体离子的顺序多级处理来实现物质的化学鉴定。 在这些结构中，在环境压力下的空气中的强电场中产生化学类别特定的碎片，这是一个基本上未探索的主题。 该项目将通过技术改进和基本流程的描述来探索和成熟该主题。 这项技术的成熟将导致一个演示分析仪，它允许对某些特定应用的性能进行评估，并评估商业化的途径。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this PFI project arises with enhanced capability for humans to know the chemical composition of airborne vapors and other materials which may contain substances of some toxicity or danger. Enhancements are made on principles and practices of a method for chemical measurements known as ion mobility spectrometry which already provides security in commercial aviation with explosives detection and in military preparedness for monitoring chemical warfare agents. Innovations in this project will advance measurement technology by increasing confidence in detecting chemicals by extracting additional knowledge from the substances. Such improvements will benefit specialists needing high speed, portable chemical analyzers and society broadly when such analyzers are employed in security, medical, and consumer applications. The innovations in technology necessitate discovery and development on the behavior of substances as gas ions in strong electric fields. Understandings of these behaviors should have impacts in chemical measurements science and other physical sciences beyond this particular technology.The proposed project solves a key limitation in existing chemical analyzers based on ion mobility spectrometry which are capable only of highly selective detection and are unable to provide accurate chemical identification of substances. The objective in this project is to enable chemical identification of substances using sequential multi stage processing of gas ions derived from a substance in small planar embodiments of ion mobility spectrometry. In these structures, chemical class specific fragments are generated in strong electric fields in air at ambient pressure, a topic which is largely unexplored. This project will explore and mature this topic with technology refinement and descriptions of fundamental processes. The maturation of this technology should lead to a demonstrator analyzer which permits evaluations of performance for some specific applications and the assessment of a pathway to commercialization.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.