Moving-belt interface first available commercially

The first interface to be made available commercially was the moving-belt interface, shown schematically in Figure 4.1. 

The advantages and disadvantages of this type of interface, particnlarly in comparison to the moving-belt interface which was available at the same time, are listed below. This was one of the first LC-MS interfaces to be made commercially available and, although used in a number of laboratories, its development was halted premamrely by the introduction of the thermospray interface (as we shall see later). 

The thermospray interface overcame many of the problems enconntered with the moving-belt and direct-liquid-introdnction interfaces and with the advent of this, LC-MS became a routine analytical tool in a large number of laboratories. This was reflected in the fact that this was the first type of interface made available commercially by the majority of the mannfacturers of mass spectrometers. 

The first commercial LC-MS interface, available in 1977, was the moving-belt interface, which was a modification by MacFadden et al. [36] of the moving-wire system described by Scott et al. [35], The moving-belt interface, discussed in Ch. 4.4, was capable of introducing up to 1 ml/min of mobile phase and achieving solvent-independent analyte ionization by El or CL A similar system was described by Millington et al. [72]. 

The first two commercially available LC-MS interfaces were the moving-belt interface and the direct liquid introduction interface. These hyphenated techniques promoted pharmacological research at several stages of drug development. The polar pharmaceutical compounds that were under research in pharmacological experiments, their polar by-products from chemical synthesis or even the very polar... 

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