Design of a continuous guard ring and its application to swarm experiments

Abstract

A new type of drift tube was designed and constructed for the study on the behavior of slow ions in gases. The guard ring, made up only of an aluminous porcelain tube, is different from those of conventional thin or thick types. Thick-film resistor for microcircuits was coated over the inner surface of the tube. With this guard ring a new swarm experiment was carried out: the drift distance scanning method. Spectra representing the spatial distribution of ions for fixed drift times were obtained. Mobilities and longitudinal diffusion coefficients of K+ ions in oxygen were measured in a trial and compared with the data obtained by a conventional analysis of the arrival time spectra.

Planar Drift Tube for Ion Mobility Spectrometry

“…[27 -30] An electric field was created with the semi-conducting ink, when attached to high voltage and ground at each end of the drift tube eliminating individual rings, voltage divider and most of the electrical hardness. [27,28] Performance was comparable to a drift tube with discrete drift rings and insulators and the advantage of this simplicity of this design was complicated by reproducibly forming an even thin film of ink inside a tube.…”

IMS applications analysis

“…Finally, the number of closely fitting parts increases the manufacturing and assembly costs, and makes maintenance more difllcult. Attempts to construct a monolithic IMS cell have been limited to ceramic tubes coated with a serniconducting film on the inner surface [19,20]. These instruments were designed to optimize the electric fields in the drift regions rather than prevent leakage.…”