Incorporation of a Flared Inlet Capillary Tube on a Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometer

Flared inlet capillary tubes have been coupled with a Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) mass spectrometer to help the ion transmission from the atmospheric pressure to the first vacuum region. We investigated different types of atmospheric pressure ionization methods using flared inlet tubes. For most of the ionization methods, such as ESI and DESI, increased ion current transmitted from the atmospheric pressure ion source to the first stage vacuum system was observed with the use of our enhanced ion inlet designs. The corresponding ion intensity detected on a FT-ICR mass spectrometer was also observed to increase two- to fivefold using ESI or DESI with the flared tube inlet. Moreover, increased spray tip positional tolerance was observed with implementation of the flared inlet tube. We also include our preliminary results obtained by coupling AP-MALDI with flared inlet tube in this paper. For AP-MALDI, the measured ion current transferred through the flared inlet tube was about 2 to 3 times larger than the ion current through the control non-flared inlet tube.