Indoor Air & Safety

Real-time, comprehensive evaluation of indoor air quality.

Exposure to chloramines is a recognized health hazard in the home, recreation centers, and the workplace.

Monitoring of worker exposure to toxic chemicals is receiving increasing attention from Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) regulators. Various methods – such as photoionization detectors (PIDs), chemical indicator tubes and gas chromatography (GC) – have traditionally been used to OSH monitoring and compliance. The results have been mixed.

Formaldehyde is ubiquitous in the modern built environment, but it is also carcinogenic and so it is desirable to reduce chronic exposure in homes and workplaces. This study demonstrates the ease with which construction materials can be evaluated for their formaldehyde adsorption efficacy, by utilizing direct analysis with selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry (SIFT-MS). With this
approach, merino wool is shown to be extremely effective in adsorbing formaldehyde from air.

Direct mass spectrometry (DMS) techniques invariably struggle to speciate ethylbenzene from the xylene isomers, yet increasingly regulators are imposing different emission and exposure limits for these compounds. This application note describes a significant breakthrough for DMS, because selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry (SIFT-MS) can readily achieve direct, realtime speciation of the xylenes from ethylbenzene.

This app note introduces the next generation of SIFT-MS, Syft Tracer^TM, which launched at Pittcon 2023.  It revolutionizes volatile impurities analysis workflows through unparalleled speed, performance stability, and reproducibility.  Learn about how this innovation to real-time trace gas detection outpaces chromatography-based methods in the analysis of challenging analytes such as formaldehyde in a PEG excipient.

SIFT‐MS is now recognized as the most versatile analytical technique for the identification and quantification of trace gases down to the parts‐per‐trillion by volume, pptv, range. This statement is supported by the wide reach of its applications, from real‐time analysis, obviating sample collection of very humid exhaled breath, to its adoption in industrial scenarios for air quality monitoring. This review touches on the recent extensions to the underpinning ion chemistry kinetics library and the alternative challenge of using nitrogen carrier gas instead of helium. 

SIFT-MS has been widely applied to quantitative analysis of a broad range of VOCs in applications from food products to workplace safety to environmental monitoring, and most recently to pharmaceutical testing. This review surveys the applications of SIFT-MS in odor analysis and in workplace, environmental and consumer protection, with a particular focus on the complementarity of this real-time mass spectrometry analyzer to sensor technology and conventional laboratory techniques—in particular, gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC/MS).

Join us for this webinar to learn about Syft Tracer, the latest advancement of real-time, trace gas analysis by SIFT-MS which launched at Pittcon 2023. Hear how the recent product innovations unlock analytical bottlenecks and enable faster decisions to be made in critical process steps.