Computer Programming of Data Acquisition Board for Single Particle Laser Ablation Time-of-flight Mass Spectrometer (SPLAT-MS)
EMSL Project ID
3653
Abstract
SPLAT-MS was designed and built for real-time detection and characterization of individual aerosol particles. It has wide, practical applications in many important areas of research, such as environmental science, developing clean transportation, and developing sensitive biological warfare agent detectors for homeland security. At present it provides information on single particle aerodynamic size, density and chemical composition with a rate of 20 per second. System contains 4 laser: 2 CW diod-pumped frequency doubled Nd:YAG lasers for particle detection and 2 pulsed lasers for aerosol IR desorption/evaporation and UV ionization. In order to detect aerosol with high efficiency and precisely synchronize firing of all laser with particle arrival into ionization region of TOF-MS system utilizes very sophisticated digital timing board which controls various delay times, triggers, preset integration time intervals, thresholds, etc. For the particle mass spectra SPLAT-MS is using at present CompuScope 8500 data acquisition board with 8 bit vertical resolution and 512K on board memory.
At this time new data acquisition board with 14 bit resolution and 1MG on board memory was acquired (CompuScope 14100 made by GAGE Applied, Inc) and new PCI instrument control board was designed and under construction. I am proposing to work in collaboration with Dan Imre and Alla Zelenyuk on writing new computer program, which would be interfacing two new boards and will allow to make particle analysis more efficient by setting multiple thresholds for detection particles with different sizes and also will allow to increase sampling rate to up to 50 particles per second.
Project Details
Project type
Exploratory Research
Start Date
2003-12-10
End Date
2005-12-12
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Team Members