With the growing demand for effective, yet socially and environmentally conscious solutions to our fundamental agricultural supply chains, the need for widely deployable sensing instruments to…

Ionicscale LLC was awarded a $175,000 Project Grant from the Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program to develop membrane-based inlet systems for compact mass spectrometry-based chemical sensors. The goal of the seven-month project ending February 2024 is to enable risk reduction in deploying low-cost sensors for soil or liquid sampling. Work will focus on designing membrane inlets compatible with Ionicscale's ultra-compact chemical analyzer and demonstrating suitable vacuum performance for different analytes and sampling rates. Additionally, Ionicscale will collaborate with industry and agriculture research partners to identify critical application areas and requirements to address in future sensor field testing. The long-term objective of developing a chip-scale, low-cost sensor coupled with engineered membrane inlets is to enable widespread monitoring of water, soil and air quality at low cost for applications such as early pipeline leak detection.

With the growing demand for effective, yet socially and environmentally conscious solutions to our fundamental agricultural supply chains, the need for widely deployable sensing instruments to detect and monitor chemical signatures of contamination, infestation, or other potential issues is critically needed. Ionicscale LLC is developing low-cost, compact mass spectrometry-based chemical sensors that can be utilized for this purpose, among many others. This phase i project will enable substantial risk reduction in the development of membrane-based inlet systems allowing the deployment of low-cost sensors in soil or submerged in liquid. This effort will focus on designing the membrane-based sampling system to be compatible with ionicscale's ultra-compact chemical-mass analyzer package. Demonstrating the compatibility will require test builds and careful measurements of vacuum performance (e.g. leak and permeation rates). These measurements will help identify the best geometries and material choices for different desired analytes and sampling rates. In conjunction with demonstrating suitable membrane-based sampling systems, work with industry and agriculture research services partners will be performed to find critical need areas and requirements to address with field testing of prototype sensors in follow on phases of the project. The long-term goal of a chip-scale, low cost, size, weight, and power consumption (c-swap) mass spectrometer coupled with appropriately engineered-for-purpose membrane inlets for water, soil, or air sampling will enable a new paradigm in widespread collection of high-quality data to inform water, soil, and air quality management. Imagine the instrument is cost effective enough to simply leave at the relevant monitoring site, collecting data without the need for technical site visits. For example, such a network of sensors would allow early detection of pipeline leaks so they can be corrected before they cause catastrophic impacts to watersheds and ecosystems as well as assist clean-up efforts in contamination accidents.