SBIR Phase II: An ultra-compact, remotely programmable chemical analyzer utilizing a novel ion trap mass spectrometer

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is that it promises to greatly expand the power of mass spectrometry for chemical detection and analysis to a far broader user base than currently exists. The ultimate goal is to produce a miniaturized sensor package sufficiently affordable that it can be a replaceable component in an ultra-compact, autonomous sensor.

This is enabled by a microfabricatable ion trap geometry that circumvents key short-comings of previous chip-scale mass analyzer efforts. The company aims to one day bring this technology to the consumer market where it can inform household residents of harmful trace or odorless chemicals present in their homes. With advances in artificial intelligence and deep learning, the company’s products may also be able to inform household residents of volatile organic compound signatures from their own bodies that might be indicative of the early onset of disease, in a manner similar to dogs’ noses that have a demonstrated ability to smell certain types of cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and CoVID-19, among other conditions.

Prior to entry into the consumer market, handheld instruments can be leveraged for important in-situ analytics in fields such as defense, energy production, pharmaceutical research, and other industrial and academic applications.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will enable the development of a novel, patented ion trap mass analyzer and its utilization and commercialization as an ultra-portable chemical analyzer. Mass spectrometers are the gold standard for chemical analysis and have wide ranging applications, however, widespread utilization of these powerful instruments is hindered by their high cost, size, weight, and power.

Current portable instruments are ~$100k USD, roughly the size of a small suitcase, and operate for only a few hours on a single battery charge. The proposed innovative ion trap mass analyzer geometry scales down gracefully, enabling microfabrication or other batch manufacturing techniques to be utilized to drive significant cost savings in production to the point where the ion trap can be incorporated in an instrument physics package that is a replaceable cartridge, thus eliminating the need for expert maintenance.

Coupled with modern computational methods and processing power, these mass spectrometry-based chemical sensors could be utilized for chemical analysis applications for which mass spectrometry is currently not a cost-effective solution. This goal of ubiquitous, high specificity chemical analysis technology could generate massive amounts of novel raw data informing and creating future collective research and advanced applications/solutions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.