Progress in the Study of Electrochemical Reaction by Mass Spectrometric Ionization Sources

Electrochemical reaction is a continuous dynamic process, accompanied by generation of short-lived intermediates and complex structural substances.Therefore, precisely and effectively capturing the products of the reaction process is helpful to accurately deduce its reaction mechanism, optimize the reaction parameters and improve the reaction efficiency.At present, the mainstream electrochemical on-line monitoring techniques include spectroscopy, cyclic voltammetry and linear polarization curves.These methods are capable to detect the structure and composition changes of most substances in the reaction process.However, in order to more systematically and accurately grasp the information of all products, the real-time and in situ reaction monitoring technologies needs to be further expanded.Mass spectrometry (MS) has the advantages of high sensitivity, good selectivity, rapid response time and structural analysis, making itself an ideal research method for electrochemical reactions.In recent years, more and more reports on the study of electrochemical reaction by MS have been published.In particular, ambient ionization sources such as electrospray ionization (ESI) and its derived ionization techniques developed for electrochemistry have become a research hotspot.This review introduced the recently published electrochemistry-mass spectrometry (EC-MS) techniques, and described the electrochemical ion sources that designed and developed for different types of electrochemical reactions.