Ninety percent of our customers come to us with an idea for an upgrade to their system, resulting in us working together to brainstorm a custom solution out of our vast range of existing components.
These 'Partial Solutions' are indeed the building blocks that allow us to bolt together a pretty complex system from off-the-shelf parts.
For example, all too often a customer wants to embed a quadrupole mass filter into a system for mass selection, then do something else with the mass selected ions, rather then just do the boring thing like detecting them, like you would in a traditional flange-mounted mass filter system.
Instead, we mount the quadrupole into the center of a 'Radial Flange', which is a double-sided conflat flange, that has electrical and gas feedthroughs mounted radially between the bolt holes. The conductance-limiting plate that is bolted to the flange just inside the knife-edges serves to both limit gas conductance and provide structural support to the housing around the quadrupole. The insertion depth of the quadrupole into the upstream and downstream chambers is controlled by custom selection of the length of the housing around the quadrupole, and all electrical connections for the quadrupole mass filter are made to the Radial Flange through the radially located electrical feedthroughs.
This Radial Flange mounting concept has been applied to ion guides, with an available radially mounted gas inlet provided with the Radial Flange.
For customers who want to measure ion current 'in situ', for example to mass calibrate the quadrupole, we offer a combination einzel lens / Radial Detector, where we mount an electron multiplier and dynode radially to the center lens of a long focal length einzel lens that is mounted to the conductance-limiting plate of a Radial Flange.