This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project will develop the basis for miniaturization of Ion Cyclotron Resonance Fourier Transform Mass Spectrometry (ICR-FT-MS)instruments. This basis will be deployed in Phase II and Phase III to build and qualify such an instrument for industrial and commercial applications. The proposed research concerns the characterization of an existing small and light superconducting solenoid and the numerical simulation of the relation between ion cyclotron resonance frequency and ion mass-to-charge ratio which undergoes distortion due to a number of effects that are included in the numerical simulation. Such distortion becomes large when the magnitude of the magnetic field and the size of the ICR-FT-MS cell become small. A performance equivalent to a magnetic field of 1 T and a mass resolution in excess of 10,000 at a mass-to-charge-ratio of 100 g/mol is anticipated. Although the performance of such small and light instruments will be much lower than that of large and heavy instruments, it will combine some of the performance of currently deployed non-ICR-FT-MS instruments into a versatile instrument that bridges the price and performance gap between non-ICR-FT-MS and ICR-FT-MS. This is expected to result in a market potential of $5,000,000 per year.
