Researchers 3D print key components for a point-of-care mass spectrometer
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology Summary: Researchers 3D printed a miniature ionizer, a key component of a mass spectrometer. Their device could someday enable an affordable, in-home mass spectrometer for health monitoring.
It is complete nonsense. Making the hard vacuum needed for ions to move freely in mass spectrometry and sample handling to introduce the sample into the unit without losing vacuum are fundamentals that won't go away.
The closest to a quick dirt cheap MS is time of flight laser ablation if your sample is a solid or can be put on one. Liquid samples are really messy and water vapour is the bane of vacuum systems.
Selective ion probes offer a much better alternative for bio samples (I suppose the MIT PR department has to justify its existence somehow).
3D resin printers are super cheap nowadays, and can do beautiful things. They're basically contact printers made with 8k display LCDs and UV LEDs, and give you nice repeatable 17-micron voxels.
It doesn't matter so much that something takes a day to print, if you can have a shelf full of printers for $2k.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
It wouldn't be much use in a mass spectrometer if it did. Out-gassing vaccuum systems always involves getting them hot for quite a while and pumping them hard. Maybe you have to laser fuse a thin layer over the entire surface while maintaining a high vaccuum.
As Phil Hobbs says, the printers are cheap so you can put a lot in parallel. The post-processing to get the outgassing down might not be so easily paralleled.
Not all 3D printers use resin, for instance:
This isn't the first 3D printed part in the RS-25 engine (evolved from the SSME), just the largest so far. The printer for beach-ball size titanium parts might cost a bit more than $2k and probably won't fit on a shelf, but I bet those helium-tight components don't outgas much :-).
(I did the detail, process and tooling designs for the HP oxidizer turbopump shaft seals for the original SSME ~1980, per proposal design and design rules by the late Dr. Philip Stein, PhD in metallurgy from MIT 1927 IIRC. LOX on one side, hot H2 and steam on the other, lube oil mist and bearings in between, ~28k RPM shaft with play and significant thermal movement, engines shut down automatically if either seal fails. So I check now and then to make sure none of my parts have failed :-).
Glen
Fun. The resin printers start at around $100, though. I’m very willing to trade off the ability to print titanium for that. ;)
An excellent idea. I do the same with my body parts. ;)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Some of the exotic very crosslinked UV polymers from resin baths might not outgas but the sintered stuff would be very problematic. Using 3D printing for a variant of lost wax metal casting would be OK though.
Back when I was involved the only polymers allowed in hard vacuum were PTFE (which creeps) and PEEK (which is a good engineering plastic). Nothing else could stand up to the aggressive baking procedures needed to dry them out to hard vacuum.
My favourite toy demo on 3D printers is a digital sundial which shows the time in a 7 segment style display with 10 minute resolution. Adjusting it for summertime is a trivial rotation.
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