Reproducible 3D-printed unibody drift tubes for ion mobility spectrometry

•IMS drift tubes can be 3D-printed as unibodies instead of as separate parts.•Unibodies consist of fused alternating layers of conducting and insulating filament.•Unibodies are printed to within 0.3 % of the programmed length.•Unibodies lengths are printed to within 0.1 % precision of each other.•3D-printed unibody drift tubes have potential application in mass produced systems. Ion mobility spectrometry-based detectors exhibit a range of reduced ion mobility (K0) values when exposed to the same chemical under identical conditions. One component of instrument accuracy that may contribute to this variation is the manufacturing process of mass-produced systems. Mass-produced ion mobility drift tubes often consist of hand assembled materials, and errors in construction will create inhomogeneous electric fields and differing physical lengths among drift tubes. The ultimate effect will be a discrepancy between the true ion path length and the intended drift length. It is hypothesized that this ultimately contributes to observed differences in peak shape and position and the resulting ranges of chemical K0 values seen for identical detectors. Here, we report on a unibody ion mobility drift tube that is constructed using 3D printing and consists of fused and alternating conductive and insulating layers of preprogrammed and reproducible length. The reproducibility in the length across multiple drift tube prints was assessed using 2,6-di-tert-butylpyridine as an accurate ion mobility calibrant.