Continuous Flow Isotope Ratio Monitoring Mass Spectrometers

Continuous Flow Isotope Ratio Monitoring Mass Spectrometers... 

Between the early 1950s, when the dual viscous-flow mass spectrometer was introduced by Nier and the mid 1980s only minor modifications have been made on the hardware of commercial mass spectrometers. Special efforts have been undertaken in the past years to reduce the sample size for isotope measurements. This has led to a modification of the classic dual inlet technique to the continuous-flow isotope ratio monitoring mass spectrometer in which the gas to be analyzed is a trace gas in a stream of carrier gas, which achieves viscous-flow conditions. Today, the majority of gas mass spectrometers are sold with the continuous flow system, instead of the dual inlet system. 

With the application of the newly developed continuous-flow isotope-ratio monitoring mass spectrometers, the required seawater sample volume for N2O dual isotope measurements have been drastically reduced and therefore facilitated the determination high resolution depth profiles of the N2O dual isotope signature (Brand, 1996 Yoshinari et al, 1997) Repeated measurements of depth profiles at... 

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