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Printer FriendlyReprinted with permission from Popular Mechanics, October
1999.
© Copyright The Hearst Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Super funnel
A super funnel can make the most sensitive instrument in most chemistry labs even more sensitive.
"Only a small fraction of the ions that are created for analysis are ever transmitted through the mass spectrometer and ultimately detected," says Richard Smith, of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. Smith's Electrodynamic Ion Funnel uses a series of conductive ring electrodes of decreasing internal diameter to more effectively focus and transmit ions.
The device is initially being used in biomedical research, to separate large numbers of proteins from small biological samples.
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