Quadrupole Mass Filters
Reliance Precision Limited has over 15 yrs experience in the manufacture of Quadrupole Mass Filters (QMF) for mass spectrometers. Over these years their facilities have evolved into a state of the art quadrupole manufacturing facility with experienced designers, clean room assembly, inspection and precision cleaning.
It is well known that the Quadrupole Mass Filters requires a very high degree of mechanical accuracy. Reliance have developed a computer model of the Quadrupole Mass Filters. This is used to evaluate the design of a Quadrupole Mass Filters against its performance criteria. Tolerance details for size, straightness, orthogonality, symmetry, positional accuracy, curvature , taper, and parallelism can be studied, and tolerances relevant to the customer's application may be stipulated. The model can produce details of ion entrance conditions, trajectories, and exit conditions. as well as representative mass peak shape calculations. Transmission versus resolution can be rapidly assessed for any design and in doing so the optimum ion injection conditions can be specified.
The manufacturing processes are based around [xxx,yyy,12mm] diameter electrode rods, dimensions and features of which can be produced to precisions of 20 Parts Per Million (PPM). To match this the mechanical dimensions of the parts and assemblies can be determined down to hundredths of a micron, often using unique Reliance designed and manufactured test equipment. The Quadrupole Mass Filters high sensitivity to contamination is well known and as such Reliance use a specially designed cleaning process on a robot controlled automated line to achieve the highest consistency of precision cleaning. Reliance also operates a manual assembly process using a highly skilled workforce in a laminar flow cleanroom classified to ISO 14644-1 Class ISO 6 (Fed Standard 209D Class 1,000).