Dielectric Barrier Discharge Ionization-Mass Spectrometry (DBDI-MS) Development and Applications

Mass spectrometry (MS) is the gold standard analytical technique for the low level determination of small organic molecules. For most applications, MS is hyphenated with either liquid chromatography (LC) or gas chromatography (GC), but also stand-alone ambient desorption/ionization (ADI) techniques that require minimal or no sample pretreatment are employed. In the last few years, a variety of new atmospheric pressure ionization (API) sources for MS that either use electrospray or different types of atmospheric pressure chemical ionization approaches for ionization have been developed. Many of these new atmospheric pressure chemical ionization sources are plasma-based. In the present work, dielectric barrier discharge ionization-mass spectrometry (DBDI-MS) is applied as a stand-alone ADI-MS technique as well as hyphenated to LC and GC. The analytical performance of DBDI-MS in LC/MS hyphenation is compared to atmospheric presure chemical ionization (APCI)-MS and electrospray ionization (ESI)-MS with respect to ionization of substances from a heterogenic compound library. Furthermore, it was applied for the determination of vitamin D metabolites from human serum. Hyphenation of GC and DBDI-MS is applied for the determination of semifluorinated n-alkanes from complex matrices. DBDI-MS as a stand-alone ADI-MS technique is used for the determination of the peroxiode-based explosives triacetone triperoxide (TATP) and diacetone diperoxide (DADP).