Industrial Automation Magazine India

Lightweight and inexpensive, miniaturised mass filters are a key step toward portable mass spectrometers that could identify unknown chemicals in remote settings.

January 2024 – Mass spectrometers, devices that identify chemical substances, are widely used in applications like crime scene analysis, toxicology testing, and geological surveying. But these machines are bulky, expensive, and easy to damage, which limits where they can be effectively deployed.

Using additive manufacturing, MIT researchers produced a mass filter, which is the core component of a mass spectrometer that is far lighter and cheaper than the same type of filter made with traditional techniques and materials.

Their miniaturized filter, known as a quadrupole, can be completely fabricated in a matter of hours for a few dollars. The 3D-printed device is as precise as some commercial-grade mass filters that can cost more than $100,000 and take weeks to manufacture.

Built from durable and heat-resistant glass-ceramic resin, the filter is 3D printed in one step, so no assembly is required. Assembly often introduces defects that can hamper the performance of quadrupoles.

This lightweight, cheap, yet precise quadrupole is one important step in Luis Fernando Velásquez-García’s 20-year quest to produce a 3D-printed, portable mass spectrometer.

“We are not the first ones to try to do this. But we are the first ones who succeeded at doing this. There are other miniaturized quadrupole filters, but they are not comparable with professional-grade mass filters. There are a lot of possibilities for this hardware if the size and cost could be smaller without adversely affecting the performance,” says Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and senior author of a paper detailing the miniaturized quadrupole.

For instance, a scientist could bring a portable mass spectrometer to remote areas of the rainforest, using it to rapidly analyze potential pollutants without shipping samples back to a lab. And a lightweight device would be cheaper and easier to send into space, where it could monitor chemicals in Earth’s atmosphere or on those of distant planets. 

Velásquez-García is joined on the paper by lead author Colin Eckhoff, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS); Nicholas Lubinsky, a former MIT postdoc; and Luke Metzler and Randall Pedder of Ardara Technologies.

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