Analysis of Vehicle Interior Air Quality (VIAQ) Using SIFT-MS

Martin Perkins

22nd November 2017

Vehicle interior air quality (VIAQ) has been of concern to both car manufacturers and the public for some time, along with the possible health impact of this “new car smell”. This has led to several countries imposing concentration limits on a range of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The current analytical methodologies are centered on either GC-MS or HPLC based technologies, which are relatively slow and can be expensive to run. They also suffer from potential discrimination of difficult compounds, such as small polar compounds like formaldehyde or acrolein. This application note demonstrates the use of SIFT-MS to carry out VIAQ testing over 5 hours of ambient heating. A suite of 13 analytes were monitored, with a final air conditioning purge at the end of the analysis showing some unexpected concentration spikes.