SepSolve Analytical Ltd (Peterborough, UK) has launched the BenchTOF2™—a next generation mass spectrometer for GC and GC×GC—that through enhanced sensitivity, improved spectral quality, heightened selectivity, and an extended dynamic range, maximizes the amount of information extracted from every single sample, and removes the guesswork associated with compound identification.
“Put simply, BenchTOF2 means that analysts need never miss a compound of interest again,” says SepSolve Analytical’s product marketing manager, Dr. Laura McGregor.
Despite its big abilities, the new BenchTOF2 is small and compact, requiring minimal space, and can be coupled with all popular GCs, as well as being the ideal partner to GC×GC. It is also fully certified for use with hydrogen carrier gas.
BenchTOF2™ has detection limits of less than 20 fg, improved match factors and isotope abundancies, mass accuracy of less than 50 ppm, and advanced software that includes innovations such as isotope overlays, tools for automated filtering of chromatograms, and a mass-to-formula calculator—all of which help to remove the guesswork and complexity commonly associated with analyte identification.
It also benefits from a dynamic range spanning five orders of magnitude, making it extremely useful for accurate quantitation of high-concentration compounds while maintaining low detection limits for trace analytes in a single run.
Furthermore, the BenchTOF2 incorporates SepSolve Analytical’s patented Tandem Ionisation®, which offers simultaneous hard- and soft-ionization in order to simplify structural elucidation. McGregor explains: “While some mass spectrometers rely solely on mass resolution to distinguish between analytes, BenchTOF2 goes further by offering unique Tandem Ionisation functionality, with our new tandem file format allowing both MS data blocks to be integrated into one datafile for streamlined processing. Using new software tools, such as dual library searching, isomers that cannot be differentiated based on their 70 eV spectra alone, can now be identified quickly and confidently based on their low-energy spectra.
The combination of this with BenchTOF2’s upgraded software and boosted sensitivity, means that when coupled with advanced chromatographic techniques such as GC×GC, the end result is a system that is equally at home performing exploratory work on non-target compounds in the research sector, as it is performing a target-based analysis in a commercial lab.”
Bob Green, business manager at SepSolve Analytical, echoes this sentiment: “BenchTOF2 makes it easy to switch between routine and ‘discovery’ workflows, allowing it to adapt to the evolving needs of businesses, without impacting productivity.”
Green also highlights how BenchTOF2 is part of a wider offering from the company, including modular robotics, thermal desorbers, and systems for automated sample extraction and enrichment: “BenchTOF2 fully integrates into our product portfolio, allowing us to provide complete end-to-end GC and GC×GC workflows, further enhancing our capability to solve problems in separation science.”