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NASA NTRS2003

Use of an Ultrasonic/Sonic Driller/Corer to Obtain Sample Powder for CHEMIN, a Combined XRD/XRF Instrument

A miniature CHEMIN XRD/XRF (X-Ray Diffraction/X-Ray Fluourescence) instrument is currently being developed for definitive mineralogic analysis of soils and rocks on Mars. One of the technical issues that must be addressed in order to enable XRD analysis on an extraterrestrial body is how best to obtain a representative sample powder for analysis. For XRD powder diffraction analyses, it is beneficial to have a fine-grained sample to reduce preferred orientation effects and to provide a statistically significant number of crystallites to the X-ray beam. Although a 2-dimensional detector as used in the CHEMIN instrument will produce good results with poorly prepared powders, the quality of the data will improve if the sample is fine-grained and randomly oriented. An Ultrasonic/Sonic Driller/Corer (USDC) currently being developed at JPL is an effective mechanism of sampling rock to produce cores and powdered cuttings. It requires low axial load (< 5N) and thus offers significant advantages for operation from lightweight platforms and in low gravity environments. The USDC is lightweight (<0.5kg), and can be driven at low power (<5W) using duty cycling. It consists of an actuator with a piezoelectric stack, ultrasonic horn, free-mass, and drill bit. The stack is driven with a 20 kHz AC voltage at resonance. The strain generated by the piezoelectric is amplified by the horn by a factor of up to 10 times the displacement amplitude. The tip impacts the free-mass and drives it into the drill bit in a hammering action. The free-mass rebounds to interact with the horn tip leading to a cyclic rebound at frequencies in the range of 60-1000 Hz. It does not require lubricants, drilling fluid or bit sharpening and it has the potential to operate at high and low temperatures using a suitable choice of piezoelectric material. To assess whether the powder from an ultrasonic drill would be adequate for analyses by an XRD/XRF spectrometer such as CHEMIN, powders obtained from the JPL ultrasonic drill were analyzed and the results were compared to carefully prepared powders obtained using a laboratory bench scale Retsch mill.

Chipera, S. J.↗

DOE OSTI2021

A Miniature Multilevel Structures for Lossless Ion Manipulations Ion Mobility Spectrometer with Wide Mobility Range Separation Capabilities

Here, ion mobility spectrometry employing structures for lossless ion manipulations (SLIM-IMS) is an attractive gas-phase separation technique due to its ability to achieve unprecedented effective ion path lengths (>1 km) and IMS resolving powers in a small footprint. The emergence of multilevel SLIM technology, where ions are transferred between vertically stacked SLIM electrode surfaces, has subsequently allowed for ultralong single pass path lengths (>40 m) to be achieved, enabling ultrahigh resolution IMS measurements to be performed over the entire mobility range in a single experiment. The implementation of multiple SLIM levels requires very little additional space for the SLIM system, and we developed a miniature SLIM module (miniSLIM) based on multilevel SLIM technology and report the performance here. The module is 11.1 cm x 6.7 cm x 1.4 cm (L x W x H) and consists of three SLIM levels totaling 1-meter path length. Ion trajectory simulations were used to optimize the SLIM board spacings and SLIM board thicknesses of the miniSLIM IMS system. Methods of efficiently transferring ions between SLIM levels were examined and a new approach using asymmetric traveling waves (TWs) was developed and implemented in the miniSLIM. We experimentally characterized the performance of the --meter multilevel miniSLIM IMS-MS relative to a drift tube IM--MS using an Agilent tuning mixture and tetraalkylammonium cations. The 1-meter miniSLIM achieved a resolving power of up to 131 (CCS/ΔCCS), ~1.5x higher than achievable with a 78 cm path length drift tube IMS, and successfully transmitted the entire ion mobility range in a single separation. We also demonstrated the miniSLIM’s performance as a standalone IMS system (i.e., without MS), showing baseline separation between Agilent tuning mixture cations with the full mobility range observed, and a standard peptide mixture with different charge states readily differentiated. Overall the miniSLIM provides a compact alternative to high performance IMS instruments possessing similar path lengths.

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