Silicon Microleaks for Inlets of Mass Spectrometers

These devices could contribute to feasibility of small, portable mass spectrometers.

Microleaks for inlets of mass spectrometers used to analyze atmospheric gases can be fabricated in silicon wafers by means of photolithography, etching, and other techniques that are commonly used in the manufacture of integrated circuits and microelectro-mechanical systems. The microleaks serve to limit the flows of the gases into the mass- spectrometer vacuums to specified very small flow rates consistent with the capacities of the spectrometer vacuum pumps. There is a need to be able to precisely tailor the dimensions of each microleak so as to tailor its conductance to a precise low value. (As used here, “conductance” signifies the ratio between the rate of flow in the leak and the pressure drop from the upstream to the downstream end of the leak.) To date, microleaks have been made, variously, of crimped metal tubes, pulled glass tubes, or frits. Crimped-metal and pulled-glass-tube microleaks cannot readily be fabricated repeatably to precise dimensions and are susceptible to clogging with droplets or particles. Frits tend to be differentially chemically reactive with various gas constituents and, hence, to distort the gas mixtures to be analyzed. The present approach involving micro-fabrication in silicon largely overcomes the disadvantages of the prior approaches.