Hello Everyone,
I made the mistake of straying 100 mM TEAA in water in orbitrap elite. Now the 102 peak is not going away. The LC system seems clean and TEAA is probably in the ESI source and the mass spec itself. I have cleaned the inside capillary and the cone multiple times including with acetic acid. Backout did not help either. What should I do? Clean the s lense? Do the steam cleaning? please help!
Did you try to clean the ion source housing? Just a lint-free wipe soaked with methanol and thoroughly clean the body of the housing. Then let to spray clean the mobile phase and monitor 102 m/z. You will see if the intensity declines or keep stable. Sometimes it needs time - hours or days. It has to be contaminated prior to the ESI, contamination in the ion optics manifests different way than ion present in the background
Good luck
Thank you very much for your answer. If I understand correctly, we did clean the whole macro ESI housing with methanol-water. The intensity is not going down and we think it's inside the mass spectrometer. Any advice there?
It cannot be inside the masspec. There is no possibility for compounds to be ionized. Try to replace the ESI needle inside of the ESI probe and all lines prior to that (connecting capillary).
To update the community, we have tried many things like flashing with isopropanol-water acetic acid (50/40/10) mix, cleaning the front parts by sonication and etc. It did not work. When we cleaned the s lens, the peak was gone. So cleaning your s-lens works.
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