From waste incinerators to chip fabs, mass spectrometry is closing the gap between PFAS emissions and real-time detection.
A few years ago, PFAS monitoring in air was largely a research curiosity, confined to a handful of academic labs willing to wrestle with low concentrations and difficult chemistry. That has changed fast. Waste incinerators, remediation contractors, chipmakers, and consumer product testers are now asking the same question that once belonged almost exclusively to atmospheric chemists: what is coming out of these processes, and how much PFAS is being released in it?
The shift is partly regulatory and partly technical. As PFAS restrictions tighten across water and soil, attention is turning to the pathway that connects the two: air. A new generation of mass spectrometry is making it possible to watch that pathway in real time, rather than waiting weeks for a lab report that only confirms what was already suspected.
The problem with looking only after the fact
Most regulatory PFAS air methods, including the EPA’s OTM-45, OTM-50 and upcoming OTM -55, are built around collecting a sample and sending it out for analysis. That works for compliance reporting, but it has a structural blind spot: it cannot see what happens between samples. A short-lived process upset, a temperature spike, a batch with an unusual feedstock, all of it can pass through a stack or vent undetected if the sampling window misses it. In addition, OTM methods often require complex sampling procedures and specialised personnel, making each measurement relatively expensive. Results are available only after laboratory analysis, creating delays of weeks before operators receive actionable information. By the time elevated emissions are identified, the event has already passed, leaving little opportunity to investigate the root cause or take immediate corrective action.
Further, a recent review in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment examined what happens when PFAS-laden materials are destroyed by incineration or pyrolysis and found that even processes reporting destruction efficiencies above 99.99% can still release measurable fluorinated byproducts, so-called products of incomplete destruction. Because these byproducts often differ chemically from the parent PFAS being monitored, a fixed target list can miss them entirely. Continuous, broad-spectrum measurement is one of the few ways to catch what a snapshot method is structurally unable to see.
Moving towards a direct, real-time approach
The technology now closing that gap is chemical ionisation mass spectrometry, typically paired with iodide reagent ions for PFAS-specific sensitivity. Instead of collecting a sample for later analysis, the instrument ionises the air stream directly and identifies compounds by mass in seconds. Detection limits in the parts-per-trillion range are achievable, and because nothing must be physically prepared or separated first, the technique can run continuously, unattended, in the kind of environment a lab instrument would never tolerate.
The TOFWERK, a Bruker Company, Vocus mass spectrometer puts this chemistry to work in the field, and the company’s own deployments over the past two years offer a useful snapshot of how differently this capability is being applied across industries. Webinar Link
Four industries, four very different air problems
Waste-to-energy
At a Swiss municipal waste incineration plant, a Vocus instrument ran for a two-week campaign sampling treated flue gas through a heated transfer line, switching between ionisation modes to track both PFAS and related nitrogen compounds. Trifluoroacetic acid, one of the smallest and most persistent PFAS, showed consistent concentrations in the tens of parts per trillion, alongside longer-chain acids at lower levels. The deployment was framed as a proof of concept rather than a finalised method, but it demonstrated something that less sophisticated flue gas monitoring (built around techniques like FTIR) simply cannot do: resolve short-chain PFAS at concentrations well below what those older methods can see.
Soil remediation
In Denmark, a thermal desorption pilot project treated soil from a former firefighter training ground, a textbook PFAS hotspot given decades of firefighting foam use. A field-deployed instrument tracked off-gassing throughout a 90-day heating ramp from ambient temperature to 400°C, watching hydrofluoric acid and a suite of perfluorocarboxylic acids in real time as the furnace moved through drying, ramping, and holding stages. That kind of temporal resolution lets remediation teams see how a treatment is performing while it’s running, rather than reconstructing it afterwards from a handful of grab samples.
Semiconductor manufacturing
Fluorinated materials used in semiconductor manufacturing, including photoresists and other polymer-based process materials, can release PFAS and related fluorinated compounds during elevated-temperature processing. Lab testing across a temperature ramp from roughly 100°C to 250°C – representative of temperatures used during resist bake and other thermal process steps – showed increasing PFAS outgassing from two polymer-based materials as temperature increased. Multiple PFAS species were measured simultaneously at concentrations ranging from sub-parts-per-trillion to approximately one part per billion. Semiconductor material qualification already evaluates process compatibility, contamination risk, reliability, and lithographic performance. Real-time PFAS monitoring adds another dimension by quantifying fluorinated compounds released during thermal processing.
As semiconductor manufacturers face increasing regulatory scrutiny over PFAS use and emissions, understanding thermal outgassing from process materials is becoming increasingly important for environmental monitoring, occupational exposure assessments, and material qualification.
Consumer products
Most PFAS air monitoring has focused on industrial sources, but a growing body of evidence suggests indoor environments deserve more attention. Nail polish and wall paint, both common sources of PFAS in household products, have been shown to off-gas measurable amounts of fluorinated compounds even at room temperature, with the specific chemical fingerprint varying by product type. That variability, combined with how easily semi-volatile PFAS can be lost or carried over during sampling, makes consumer product testing one of the harder corners of this field to get right.
Where the field is heading
Industry standards are beginning to reflect this shift. ASTM’s D8560-24 guide, covering indoor air PFAS measurement, explicitly recognises chemical ionisation mass spectrometry as a complement to traditional sorbent-based sampling, particularly suited to capturing fast-moving emission events and spatial variability that slower methods miss. It is not a wholesale replacement; sorbent methods still offer lower detection limits for some compounds and remain the basis for most regulatory compliance work.
What is changing is the role real-time measurement plays alongside them. Across waste management, remediation, manufacturing, and consumer products, the same pattern keeps showing up: organisations that once treated PFAS air emissions as something to test for periodically are starting to treat them as something to watch continuously. As that shift continues, the instruments capable of keeping up with PFAS in motion, not just PFAS in a sample vial, look increasingly central to how the field understands its own problem.
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