Sandia National Laboratories chemists have compressed PFAS detection to as little as five minutes per sample, reaching low parts-per-trillion sensitivity through a technique called ISA-DESI that bypasses the multi-hour extraction-and-concentration cycles that dominate current analytical workflows.

The method, developed by chemist Ryan Davis and postdoctoral researcher Nathan Bays under a Laboratory Directed Research and Development grant, pairs a millimetre-scale adsorbent particle with desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry. The team published the procedure to enable commercialization and extension to other environmental pollutants.

What does the current PFAS workflow cost labs?

Standard PFAS testing starts with a litre or more of sample liquid forced through an extraction cartridge. Operators repeat the capture-and-concentrate cycle with fresh cartridges until enough analyte accumulates for instrumental readout. Cartridges cost several hundred dollars apiece, and total turnaround runs from hours to days depending on concentration.

"A common complaint of ours and others who are doing PFAS analysis is that it's slow and can be costly depending on the technology," Davis said.

How does ISA-DESI differ?

The Sandia protocol uses an adsorbent roughly the size of a Rice Krispies treat. Researchers place the particle in the test solution for three minutes, withdraw it, and position it in front of a mass spectrometer inlet. Charged electrospray droplets strike the particle surface, ionize the captured PFAS, and carry it into the detector. The instrument returns concentration and compound identity in the same run.

The team reached its current sensitivity iteratively. "One step at a time, we went from just being able to see PFAS at parts-per-million to levels at parts-per-billion, and finally low parts-per-trillion," Bays said.

The detection range matters because regulatory and health thresholds now sit at the low-ppt level. "More and more research shows that PFAS can have negative outcomes at even low concentrations, so detecting at those low concentrations is key," Davis said.

What sits between the prototype and field deployment?

Davis and Bays framed the work as an open platform. They published the procedure rather than patenting the full stack, with the stated goal of enabling outside groups to reproduce and commercialize the hardware chain: a millimetre-scale adsorbent, a DESI source, and a standard mass spectrometer.

The researchers also extended the workflow to gas-phase sampling, a direction with immediate relevance to Sandia's nuclear-weapons stewardship portfolio. "While our first phase worked with liquid, our more recent work has explored the gas phase," Davis said, citing potential use in off-gassing measurements tied to stockpile surveillance.

Cost and accessibility drive the broader framing. "We want a technology that can be broadly accessible, not only for researchers but for the broader public and government," Davis said. That positioning targets cartridge-based kits that price individual household testing out of reach, though Sandia has not disclosed per-test operating cost.

What the release does not confirm

The published procedure establishes a five-minute upper bound and a low-ppt detection floor, but the announcement does not specify a quantitative limit of detection for individual PFAS congeners, reproducibility across matrices, or validation against certified reference materials. The team has not yet disclosed whether ISA-DESI can substitute for established analytical protocols in regulated monitoring.

Where the work goes next

The Sandia team plans to extend the adsorbent-DESI combination beyond PFAS to other persistent environmental contaminants and to gas-phase analytics. Whether the five-minute cycle and ppt-level sensitivity survive inter-laboratory benchmarking will determine whether the method migrates from a research demonstration into the routine toolkit of environmental labs and, eventually, consumer-facing water testing.