Effects of Aerosol Size and Coating Thickness on the Molecular Detection using Extractive Electrospray Ionization

Abstract. Extractive electrospray ionization (EESI) is a well-known technique for high throughput online molecular characterization of chemical reaction products and intermediates, detection of native biomolecules, in vivo metabolomics, and environmental monitoring with negligible thermal and ionization-induced fragmentation for over two decades. However, the EESI extraction mechanism remains uncertain. Prior studies disagree whether analyte particles between 20 and 400 nm diameter are fully extracted or if the extraction is limited to the surface layer. Here, we examined the analyte extraction mechanism by assessing the influence of analyte particle size and coating thickness on the detection of the molecules therein. We find that analyte particles are extracted fully: Organics-coated NH4NO3 particles with a fixed core volume (156 and 226 nm in diameter without coating) show constant signals for NH4NO3 independent of the shell coating thickness, while the signals of the secondary organic molecules comprising the shell varied proportionally to the shell volume. We also find that the EESI sensitivity exhibits a strong size dependence, with an increase in sensitivity by one to three orders of magnitude as analyte particle size decreases from 300 nm to 30 nm. This dependence varies with the electrospray (ES) droplet size and the analyte particle residence time in the EESI inlet, suggesting that the EESI sensitivity is influenced by the coagulation rates between analyte particles and ES droplets. Overall, our results indicate that, in the EESI, analyte particles are fully extracted by the ES droplets regardless of the chemical composition, when they are collected by the ES droplets. However, their coalescence is not complete and depends strongly on their size. This size-dependence is especially relevant when EESI is used to probe size-varying analyte particles as is the case in aerosol formation and growth studies with size ranges below 100 nm, while it does not significantly influence the detection of ambient aerosol dominated by particle sizes ranging between 100–2500 nm, i.e. the accumulation mode.