FAQ

-ionRocket-

Q1 : What is the ionRocket?

A1： It is a thermal desorption and pyrolysis device for DART^®-MS that heats the sample straight from room temperature to up to 600℃. In particular, the solid samples that are insoluble in solvents are targeted, and the ionRocket enables to analyze “thermal extraction” and “pyrolysis” at once without pretreatment and exerts its power for applications such as “additive analysis”, “polymer analysis” and so on.

Q2 : What is the DART^®?

A2： It is an ion source that applies the excited helium to the sample at atmospheric pressure liquid,solid and powder over excited helium.

Q3：Which of mass spectrometers are compatible with the ionRocket and DART^®?

A3： The DART^® activates the ionization at atmospheric pressure, so it is compatible only with mass spectrometers dedicated for LC. At present it is connectable to almost any mass spectrometers for LC which are commercially available. (There are some of those that cannot be connected) For further details, please refer to the analysis application page.

Q4 : What are the typical ionRocket applications?

A4： Analysis of additives in resins(identification), evaluation of resin degradation (comparison with normal products), polymer characterization, analysis of foreign substances (discrimination between same materials), qualitative analysis of specific components from solid sample・quantitative determination, evaluation of thermal behavior of sample (heat resistance evaluation), etc. are available.
For further details, please refer to the analysis application page.

A5： Yes. A calibration curve with correlation coefficient from 0.99 to 0.999 can be obtained, so it can be applied to quantification. Especially the analyze is implemented out very effectively when quantifying specific compounds in solid sample since it does not require pretreatment.
* Because it does not require pretreatment such as extraction with a solid sample, it is unnecessary to consider errors in pretreatment.

A6：
① Reduction of analysis time
It takes around 2 hours in double shot analysis in which the thermal desorption for analyzing the volatile components in the polymer and the pyrolysis of polymer residue are carried out continuously. However with the ionRockt DART^®-MS it takes only 7 minutes for analysis.
② The wide range of analyzing objects
What is targeted by pyrolysis GC / MS is a component with relatively low polarity and m / z 1000 or less. On the other hand, with the ionRocket DART^®-MS, components with low to high polarity and m / z 2000 or less can be subjected. Also, unlike GC / MS, there is no separation column or cold spot, so in principal even components that cannot be detected by GC / MS can be detected.

③ Identification of unknown components
With the pyrolysis GC / MS, fragmentation is generated due to ionization by EI, so it is likely to be difficult to detect molecular-related ions, and it is especially difficult to identify peaks that do not hit in the library. On the other hand, the ionRocket DART^®-MS can identify the unknown peaks by using high-resolution MS such as TOF or Q-TOF because the soft ionization detects molecular-related ions.

A7： Indeed, knowledge about MS may be required to some extent, but regarding chemical industry such as additives and polymer raw materials, we have prepared “Compound Search” which is a database for chemical industry or “DiscoveryM” which is a search software applicable to the spectrum of complex system. So you can analyze relatively easier without special knowledge or experience.