• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.1023-1028
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• 2014

Protonated caffeine ($CH^+$) and glucosamine ($GH^+$) overlapped in an analysis with ion mobility spectrometryquadrupole mass spectrometry. Ethyl lactate vapor (L) at different concentrations from 0 to 22 mmol $m^{-3}$ was added as a buffer gas modifier to separate these signals. The drift times of $CH^+$ and $GH^+$ increased with L concentration. The drift time increase was associated to clustering equilibria of $CH^+$ and $GH^+$ with one molecule of L and the equilibrium of $GH^+$ was more displaced to the formation of $GLH^+$ than that of $GLH^+$. $GH^+$ clustered more to L than $CH^+$ because $GLH^+$ formed more stable hydrogen bonds (26.30 kcal/mol) than $GLH^+$ (24.66 kcal/mol) and the positive charge in $GH^+$ was more sterically accessible than in $CH^+$. The aim of this work was to use theoretical calculations to guide the selection of a buffer gas modifier for IMS separations of two compounds that overlap in the mobility spectra and predict this separation, simplifying that empirical process.