Letter 15009

Cleaning Molybdenum  

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We design and manufacture mass spectrometers. One of these instruments is a Quadrupole mass spectrometer. The mass filter in this instrument is a set of 4 rods made from high purity (99.95 % pure) molybdenum. They are approximately 12 mm in diameter and about 131 mm long. I am looking for a procedure that will clean the molybdenum the will remove the metallic impurities that get embedded on the surface during the fabrication of these parts.

These rods are centerless ground and then lapped to the final dimensions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Silvester D'Couto
Austin, TX

How deep are these impurities? My recommendation is electropolish to final dimention. You may need to build a tuned cell to get the final dimention accurate, depending on specs.

Dave Kinghorn      Chemical Engineer SUNNYvale, California

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