AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Quantifying and Improving the Performance of a new Single Particle Mass Spectrometer
MARIA ZAWADOWICZ, Philip Croteau, Fabian Mahrt, Nicholas Marsden, Daniel Cziczo, MIT
Abstract Number: 557 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract Single particle mass spectrometers (SPMS) have contributed to in-situ chemical characterization of atmospheric aerosols and studies related to cloud droplet formation and ice nucleation, both in field and in laboratory, for well over a decade. SPMS instruments combine precise aerodynamic optical particle sizing with UV laser desorption and ionization followed by time of flight mass spectrometry. The advantage of SPMS instruments for atmospheric research, especially related to cloud formation, is the single particle resolution and high sensitivity to trace chemical species. The Laser Ablation Aerosol Particle Time-of-Flight mass spectrometer (LAAPTOF) is the newest member of this diverse instrument class, aiming for a miniaturized package and simplicity for the end user. This presentation will discuss the results of a comparison of this new instrument to established SPMS instruments, such as Particle Analysis by Laser Mass Spectrometry (PALMS) and Aerosol Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry (ATOFMS), carried out at the Aerosol Interaction and Dynamics in the Atmosphere (AIDA) facility at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The comparison aimed for quantifying the optical and mass spectrometry performance in characterizing a wide variety of atmospherically-relevant aerosols. This presentation will also detail the engineering challenges encountered in improving the particle detection limit of the optical region of LAAPTOF and the general challenges and performance benchmarks in designing robust optics for SPMS applications.