vacuum-diaries
THE VACUUM DIARIES
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Rough and dirty vacuum testing: my path towards high vacuum


Cremona, 2018-ongoing...
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Welcome to the Vacuum Diaries! This is a collection of pages documenting some efforts to obtain High Vacuum. See a more detailed description below.

Basic vacuum setup: starting from scratch, testing the pump, building a reservoir, measuring pumping speed.

Building feedthroughs: once the reservoir is ready, it's time to build some feedthroughs for electrical wires and for gas feeding.

First plasmas! Obtained from some kPa (around 8 Torr) down to around 250 Pa (2 Torr).

Moving to a larger vessel: flanges, gaskets and a nice cart.

Turbomolecular pump ... and its power supply.

Plugging in a mass flow controller

➡ News: I just got below 1 Pascal! But barely. The gaskets definitely leak a bit, and this makes it harder to reduce the pressure further. Notes: employ thicker flanges! Thin flanges deform too much during welding, and this makes the pressure on the silicon gasket uneven, probably leading to the leakage.

So, why vacuum systems?

Vacuum systems are the basis for a number of technical and scientific achievements, such as electron microscopy, fusors, space thrusters etc. However, almost every single component appears to cost tons of money, which is for sure out of the scope for many non-wealthy free-time experimenters (or poor PhD students as myself). This hinders tremendously the development of this science, at least at the DIY level.

So, the questions that I wish to address are:
As an appetizer, here's the first plasma obtained in the Vacuum Diaries' system!

first-plasma


Cheers,
Stefano
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