SepSolve Analytical’s sister company, Markes International (Llantrisant, UK), has announced that its US patent (US 15/231,383) for Tandem Ionisation® has been approved.

Tandem Ionisation is the latest extension of the company’s patented Select-eV® technology (US Patent Number 9,524,858). Select-eV is the technology enabling acquisition of both reference-quality 70 eV spectra and repeatable ‘soft-ionisation’ spectra without the loss in sensitivity, use of chemical reagents or hardware changes that have historically been associated with soft ionisation. This award-winning way of producing both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ EI mass spectra greatly speeds up the process of differentiating between similar compounds, such as structurally similar isomers and identifying unknowns.

Tandem Ionisation builds on the Select-eV technique by ‘multiplexing’ ionisation energies, allowing two sets of spectra to be simultaneously acquired across a single GC or GC×GC peak – both 70 eV spectra for spectral matching against commercial libraries, and the soft ionisation spectra.

Alun Cole, Founding Director at Markes International, said “Since 2014, we have worked to establish soft EI as an essential component of the GC–MS toolbox and we are thrilled that the technology continues to gain momentum. With Tandem Ionisation, BenchTOF-Select is the only instrument capable of providing analysts with all the information required for reliable compound identification in a single GC or GC×GC run”.

The Tandem Ionisation patent has been approved in the US and is patent-pending in a number of countries across the world.