Pneumatically Assisted Electrospray Needle Array For High Throughput High Flow Rate Liquid Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry

摘要

Increased signal intensities were observed for the novel electrospray probe with a pneumatically assisted needle array. The gain compared to a single needle probe was found to be compound dependent and scaled with the square root of the number of needles. Peak intensities were found to be increased for the multiple needle sprayer leading to lower detection limits. An additional benefit of the multi-capillary probe is that the nebulizing gas is flowing around each individual capillary. This allows for a much denser packing of the needles without risk of the often observed interference between the sprayers. This in turn results in a smaller overall plume size, which helps in interfacing this probe to a single mass spectrometer inlet. The six capillary probe also allows a six-fold extension of the total liquid flow rate without increasing the flow rate through an individual needle and thereby the initial droplet size. Further gains are expected from increasing the collection efficiency of the broader plume of the multiple needle sprayer into the mass spectrometer. Future studies are required to investigate the mechanism that explains the difference in response between the two compounds.