Development of Additively-Manufactured Quadrupole Mass Filters for Low-Cost and High-Performance Applications

Abstract

With a growing need for more compact and affordable mass spectrometers, many efforts have been made to miniaturize quadrupole mass filters (QMFs). Unfortunately, these efforts have yielded devices with inadequate performance for practical applications in analytical chemistry. This study reports the successful creation of a low-cost, high-performance QMF by means of additive manufacturing. Vat photopolymerization of glass-ceramic feedstock was used to create a novel, monolithic structure, and selective electroless nickel-boron plating metallizes the structure, forming a completed QMF that is lightweight and inexpensive to produce (20 USD per device). Furthermore, additive manufacturing allows QMF dimensions to be rapidly scaled to the optimal sizes for a given application, which is larger than most prior affordable quadrupole designs. Despite the limited precision of additive manufacturing, optimization techniques can be leveraged to produce high-quality devices with smooth surfaces. As a result, our QMFs achieved mass resolutions up to 164 at 69 Da, with abundance sensitivities sufficient to detect carbon-13 isotopes at lower masses—a level of performance comparable to commercial devices. These results indicate that additive manufacturing, properly employed, can significantly advance the state of the art of QMFs and other mass spectrometry technologies.