ION MOBILITY SPECTROMETER AND METHOD OF OPERATING SAME

摘要

An ion mobility spectrometer instrument may have a drift tube that is partitioned into a multiplicity of cascaded drift tube segments. A plurality of electric field activation sources may each be coupled to one or more of the multiplicity of drift tube segments. A control circuit may be configured to control operation of the plurality of electric field activation sources in a manner that sequentially applies an electric field for only a specified duration to each of the multiplicity of cascaded drift tube segments to thereby produce at the ion outlet only ions having a predefined ion mobility or range of ion mobilities.