Mount your Butterfly or Pencil Heater Column Oven on your Thermo Ion Source

Over the years MS Wil has provided many Proteomics laboratories with solutions to build column ovens close to the orifice of the Mass Spectrometer. Outside bespoke solution from Sonation, these ovens are often the different versions of Butterfly and Pencil Heaters made by Phoenix S&T. Where the Sonation oven is build to be mounted on the XYZ-manipulator arm of the Thermo Nanospray Flex Ion™ Source, there has been no real solution to mount the Phoenix column ovens to the Thermo Nanospray Flex Ion Source, let alone the EasySpray source. In this article we describe 3 new ways to mount the Phoenix column ovens on your ion source and one way to also mount the long versions in a professional way onto a Thermo Nanospray Flex Ion Source.

Mount your Column Oven to the Thermo Nanospray Flex Ion Source DirectJunction

Every Thermo Nanospray Flex Ion Source is supplied with a device called DirectJunction™ (see figure 1, right picture), which was developed in order to allow users to mount a capillary column and connected/integrated spray emitter/tip to the Ion Source in a solid way and provide current to the tip. There are many different column set-ups that you can mount to the DirectJunction succesfully, however, there is no good way to build a column oven onto this device.

In order to fit a Butterfly Heater to the DirectJunction, MS Wil developed a tray (see figure 1, left picture) that can easily be mounted to the steel rod and when in position fastened with a simple screw. The tray is designed such that Velcro ribbons can be fed through slots in the bracket to easily fix the column oven to the tray.

Figure 1. DirectJunction Tray (MSW-SB-1, left) and DirectJunction on Thermo Source with Tray (Top view, right).

Mount your Column Oven to the Thermo Nanospray Flex Ion Source XYZ-Manipulator

Over the years new solutions have been developed to add different type of spray heads to the Thermo Nanospray Flex Ion Source. In the MS Wil product portfolio we supply the nESI Sprayer (as used in figure 3, right picture) and the NewOmics multi-nozzle sprayer (as used in figure 3, left picture). Our sprayers incorporate bespoke emitters with an integrated liquid junction and allow for a Viperlike connection to fit a column or a flow-line directly to the spray head, all build for nanoflow applications.

The NewOmics solution incorporated a multi-nozzle sprayer, which splits microflow to be split into 8 nanospray emitters, allowing for near 100% spray efficiency. Two very different applications with a similar challenge when needs to be integrated with a column oven.

In order for a Butterfly or Pencil heater column oven to be mounted with one of these Sprayers, in both cases the DirectJunction needs to be removed, MS Wil developed a bracket that can be mounted on the XYZ-arm of the Thermo Nanospray Flex Ion Source (see figure 2, left picture). A rod is then screwed into the bracket and a mounting tray is positioned on the rod. Like the tray build for the DirectJunction, this tray is also fitted with slots that allow for Velcro ribbons to be fed through to allow for firmly mounting the column oven on top of the tray.

Figure 2. Column oven mounting tray with bracket (MSW-SB-2, left), and an example of using the mounting tray with a PepSep Sprayer (PSS1, right).

Figure 3. An example using a Newomics M3 emitter (E8N10MU01) with Butterfly column oven (left), and an example using a PepSep Sprayer (PSS1) with Butterfly column oven (right).

Extending the DirectJunction rod with a Column Oven Mounting tray

When using fairly long column ovens, say more than 25cm long, we see that it becomes more and more difficult to mount these long devices to your ion source. To alleviate this problem rod extensions have been available for some time now, however, none of these allow for a good way to tie your column oven to the bracket. In line with the earlier described trays, we complete the line of mounting trays with one that you can connect to the DirectJunction as an extension (see figures 4 and 5 below).

Figure 4. Mounting tray on rod extension (MSW-SB-3, left), and mounting tray on rod extension and DirectJunction Tray on source (side view, right).

Figure 5. Mounting tray on rod extension and DirectJunction Tray on source (top view).

Part Numbers & Product Specifications:

Left with any further questions or comments? Please don’t hesitate to contact us by mail (sales@mswil.com).