EC-MS TECHNOLOGY

Figure 1. H₂ evolution and CO stripping experiments using a 5 mm polycrystalline Pt electrode in 1M HClO₄. Potential sweeps are carried out at 20 mV/s. a) Different signals from the mass spectrometer corresponding to H₂ (m/z=2), He (m/z=4), CO (m/z=28), and CO₂ (m/z=44) along with the potential and current density as a function of time. b) MS signal as a function of applied voltage and CVs corresponding to the colored sweeps in a).

The system can measure composition changes of volatile species with a time resolution down to 0.1 seconds. This allows for producing EC-MS plots effortlessly, as shown in Figure 1, with EC and MS signals plotted against time (a) and applied potential (b). The software integration takes care of synchronization, so there is no need to manually (and somewhat inaccurately) record the time-zero when the EC technique is started with respect to the MS signal. For more information on software integration, see the software section.

D. B. Trimarco et al., Enabling real-time detection of electrochemical desorption phenomena with sub-monolayer sensitivity. Electrochim. Acta. 268, 520–530 (2018).