A new chemical sensor on a mass spectrometric basis

A new chemical sensor on a mass spectrometric basis has been developed for multicomponent analysis of organic vapors. The sensing principle is based on the injection of a complex sample headspace into a mass spectrometer, creating a mass spectrometric pattern of the unresolved gaseous mixture. After selecting particular fragment ions, the resulting reduced mass spectrum of the sample is treated with pattern recognition (software) based on principal components analysis. The discriminative power of this analytical tool was evaluated by separating known binary mixtures. This study also investigated the performance of the MS-Sensor for discriminating different rose oils according to their geographic origin.