TOF plotter—a program to perform routine analysis time-of-flight mass spectral data

The main article discusses the operation and application of the program to mass spectral data files. This laboratory has recently reported the construction and characterization of a linear time-of-flight mass spectrometer (ToF-MS) utilizing a radio frequency glow discharge ionization source. Data acquisition and analysis was performed using a digital oscilloscope and Microsoft Excel, respectively. Presently, no software package is available that is specifically designed for time-of-flight mass spectral analysis that is not instrument dependent. While spreadsheet applications such as Excel offer tremendous utility, they can be cumbersome when repeatedly performing tasks which are too complex or too user intensive for macros to be viable. To address this situation and make data analysis a faster, simpler task, our laboratory has developed a Microsoft Windows-based software program coded in Microsoft Visual Basic. This program enables the user to rapidly perform routine data analysis tasks such as mass calibration, plotting and smoothing on x–y data sets. In addition to a suite of tools for data analysis, a number of calculators are built into the software to simplify routine calculations pertaining to linear ToF-MS. These include mass resolution, ion kinetic energy and single peak identification calculators. A detailed description of the software and its associated functions is presented followed by a characterization of its performance in the analysis of several representative ToF-MS spectra obtained from different GD-ToF-MS systems.