A Novel Chemical Analysis Method

In NRESi colloquium last Friday, Dr. Erik Krogh from Vancouver Island University gave us the presentation on ‘Advances in Direct Mass Spectrometry for Mobilized Environmental Chemical Analysis’.

In the presentation, first he talked about the direct mass spectrometry, then he introduced the air quality and mobile mass spectrometry, after that, he represented the quantitation, chemical mapping and adaptive sampling; finally he introduced source identification, tracking and apportionment.

There is much new information I learnt from Dr. Erik Krogh’s presentation. For the mass spectrometry, the steps involve make ions, sort ions, detections of ions and record measured ions. For the air quality and mobile mass spectrometry part, he introduced the atmospheric chemistry; the primary pollutants involve mobile, industrial and area sources and the secondary pollutants. The mobile monitoring can do various data analyses such as mass spectrometry, air quality, derived data, positional, meteorological and digitized qualitative data. It is important for infield environmental monitoring, food security and point of care medical diagnostics.

The particular aspects I found out about his presentation interested is that he introduced the how to do environmental chemical analysis out of the lab. The advantages of taking the instruments out of the lab are that it reduces the sample contamination loss, increases the data coverage and Geo-spatial mapping and it also gives real-time feedback due to rapid response and adaptive sampling. There are two ways to direct sampling mass spectrometry in a moving vehicle, the membrane introduction CLT and proton transfer reaction TOF. The chemical concentrations can be used for real-time data management and mapping. It can also be used to do qualitative monitoring.

Overall, I think Dr. Erik Krogh did a very good presentation. He prepared very well for this presentation. There are also many presentation skills that I can learn from him. The content of his presentation is not relevant to my Master’s research; however the research method is a little bit relevant to my research, since my research involves doing experiments.

Many questions were asked of him. He answered the questions very well. He also prepared some question to answer in case we do not have any. If I was given the opportunity, the question that I would ask for him is that, how popular the mobilized chemical analysis is these days.