Identification of Explosives' Mixtures by Tandem Mass Spectrometry (MS/MS)

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The detection and identification of the explosive components in post-explosion residues are often complicated by the complexity of the matrix in which they are found. Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS)—a method shown to be very useful in detecting and identifying compounds in complex mixtures—has been used to identify the explosive components in several military explosives. The method consists of recording the chemical ionization (CI) spectrum of the mixture and the MS/MS collision induced dissociation (CID) spectra of typical ions from the CI spectrum. These CI spectra are then compared with the CID spectra of parallel ions in standard explosives. Identical CID spectra positively confirmed the identify of the explosive components in the analyzed explosives' mixtures.