Scaling of the resolving power and sensitivity for planar FAIMS and mobility-based discrimination in flow- and field-driven analyzers

Continuing development of the technology and applications of field asymmetric waveform ion mobility spectrometry (FAIMS) calls for better understanding of its limitations and factors that govern them. While key performance metrics such as resolution and ion transmission have been calculated for specific cases employing numerical simulations, the underlying physical trends remained obscure. Here we determine that the resolving power of planar FAIMS scales as the square root of separation time and sensitivity drops exponentially at the rate controlled by absolute ion mobility and several instrument parameters. A strong dependence of ion transmission on mobility severely discriminates against species with higher mobility, presenting particular problems for analyses of complex mixtures. While the time evolution of resolution and sensitivity is virtually identical in existing FAIMS systems using gas flow and proposed devices driven by electric field, the distributions of separation times are not. The inverse correlation between mobility (and thus diffusion speed) and residence time for ions in field-driven FAIMS greatly reduces the mobility-based discrimination and provides much more uniform separations. Under typical operating conditions, the spread of elimination rates for commonly analyzed ions is reduced from > 5 times in flow-driven to 1.6 times in field-driven FAIMS while the difference in resolving power decreases from similar to 60% to similar to 15%.