Okay, just to save you from disaster: a safety margin of 2 is completely insufficient for glass. Make that at least 5 -10. The problem is not the bulk strength of the material, it's about tensile stress at the edges of the glass. Any small crack (for example from diamond tooling) can quickly grow under these conditions, leading to catastrophic failure, destruction of your chamber and vacuum system. Not to mention serious personal hazards. Buy a much thicker disk or better, decrease the window size. Or even better : both. With this 20mm window you will never feel / be safe, even if it does not crack immediately!
20mm sounds about right for window that size, the chamber i use has several 200mm windows and those are only 10mm thick 300mm would only be bit more than double the force.
A factor of 5-10 is probably still insufficient, considering the glass was purchased from Alibaba. Saving money should be low priority when it comes to safety or risk of damage to a far more expensive vacuum pump.
If the manual suggests 22 clamps for the pump but you only added 12, wouldn't it be easy to drill 12 more holes in between the existing ones to allow for 24 clamps? That's even better than 22
I don't have a drill press in my workshop. And doing it by hand would have resulted in crooked holes. Additionally I spoke with some people with experience and they said 12 clamps are sufficient. But you are right, the best solution would have been to add more holes.
@@AdvancedTinkering You don't need a drill press to drill straight holes. In fact, it doesn't guarantee straightness. You need to make a guide block with an appropriate sized bushing.
@@AdvancedTinkering cmon man i know it's risky but it is possible to drill 12 holes straight by hand especially if you made a drill guide. just a piece of stock squared on both sides with a hole at tap drill size through it it. clamp drill guide where you want holes and go ham.
We have a sputter machine which had a large round glass window on a round sample transfer chamber at our institute. The diameter was about 80cm and the thickness about one inch or 2.5 cm. One night - luckily with nobody around - the glass imploded, after more than 20 years of service life. There was glass splinters everywhere. I have no doubt that 20mm might be sufficient, but given the origin and transport of your glass window, there might be internal stresses etc. At least mount a thick acrylic or polycarbonat sheet in front of the window!
Glass under strain is a scary thing; all it takes is a little crack, under tension, and away it goes. On the upside, it can be visualized with polarized light; strain twists the polarization, add interference and funky colors result. Not that this will be conclusive, but if it's very uniform (and, when pumped down, it should have a nice even circular gradient?), that's at least encouraging.
At my workplace we had a turbomolecular pump connected to a mass spectrometer simply explode about a week ago. If the outer Cover (which was in place for such a case) hadn't held up it would have sent shrapnel flying everywhere around the room. I don't even wanna imagine the damage to all the other sensitive equipment in the room or what would have happened to anyone that could have been in the room at the time.
@@AdvancedTinkering Yeah, that's what I meant to say by outer cover (english sometimes uh), they purposely make the housing in a way that can withstand shrapnel and it did successfully stop them in our case Sorry for being unclear there
Hahahaha I work in a semi fab, we very rarely ever use torque wrenches (only in torque critical locations, like acrylic windows, special bushings, etc.), most of the time we use SHCS with L wrenches (allen keys) so that everything is only ever hand tight, if we do use wrenches we just go until snug (vacuum pulls everything together anyway, and if it doesn't going tighter is not a good idea as you likely have another issue like a poor seal surface or misalignment). Edit: oh and a lot of this kind of equipment is stainless, stainless galls like a SOB so using hand tools where you can feel any resistance early and STOP is critical, I've seen a quarter inch stainless bolt seize on 2 to 3 threads to the point it snapped in half rather than budge. It's a real pain to drill out and add inserts. If you have something you can't afford to break I'd recommend splurging on the silver plating, it prevents the galling.
Yea - I worked in capital vacuum equipment for several years and we never once used a torque wrench. Hand tight works for pretty much everything. The bolts are usually torqued to create a seal which is at least an order of magnitude less than what is required to create a structural joint. We also sprayed absolutely every bolt with sulphur dioxide or slathered really big bolts with moly antiseize cuz yea - stainless LOVES to seize up on itself.
1:34 consider using a maroon or other fine scotchbrite and make linear motion along the path of the seal, making a "race track" finish. Otherwise the rotary device shown in the video will make perpendicular scratches along the length of the O-ring surface.
As you seem to be well versed with vacuum fittings: Is a race track finish or a polished surface better for sealing? Two friends, both engineers, argued abut that recently, and as I personally have no qualified opinion on the topic, I hereby resort to asking competent sounding strangers on the internet. Thanks in advance!
@viatorsimplex4524 idk about the op, but I work with vacuum devices every day at work, the higher quality a part is the more mirror like the polish is on the sealing surface. I've never seen a grooved sealing surface on vacuum fittings, the only place I've seen that is on cheap mass produced plastic fittings (like screw caps on bottles or cheap garden hose pieces etc.). The only professional vacuum equivalent would be metal-metal seals, like conflat or vcr, but in those cases the metal bites into a disposable metal seal washer. Perhaps they're thinking of triclamp? Those aren't vacuum fittings but they look very similar to kf fittings at a glance, they have a groove that fits a Teflon (generally) sealing washer.
@viatorsimplex4524 if brand new, an Ra 0.4 um or less is great. In this case he is reworking by hand. My comment is with respect to this particular case.
@@xxportalxx. The discussion between my two friends was about the fittings for a self-built vacuum chamber. Our self-turned KF fittings (with appropriate O-rings) initially had a subpar, but, due to turning, inherently "race tracked" finish, that worked surprisingly well considering how bad it looked. Our requirements for final vacuum were not that high (otherwise we would have used metal seals or just welded it shut with a drop of indium), so the discussion was mostly academic. I gave the flat parts a quick polish on the diamond disk and a lap to see whether there was a difference in final vacuum. Polishing to a mirror finish (with no marks visible under 20x Magnification, suggesting an N well below 4 or Ra well below 0.2 µm) showed no difference in our case, but we were likely limited by our pump anyway. Thus the question - and thank you for your answer.
If you can do it, replace the machined and 3D printed clamps with a solid ring. The 3D printed clamps are a mute point in my opinion, the creep resistance of 3D printed pastics is just not enough to provide any actual clamping force. The glass used for the port seems significant at a safety factor of 2, but considering the surface area I would have been around 3-4 SF. Sucking down a chamber this big is always time consuming, what I do for my welding chamber is store vaccum in a welding bottle. The stored vacuum can build in the backround as I work on other things then when it is time to bring down the anti chamber before the initial argon purge I just dump vacuum from the tank.
The 3D-printed clamps are purely for aesthetic purposes and don’t serve any real function. The window is only held on by the aluminum clamps. A solid ring was my first idea as well, but having one made in that size would have been too expensive for me. By the way, "storing" vacuum in a welding bottle or another container is actually a pretty clever idea!
totally keep the alternating clamps, they form quite a nice asthetic, as well as helping the light blend in. Great work on the video, It's terrific as usual!
I would put a polycarbonate shield on the INSIDE of the chamber over the window, to catch any inward-flying glass shards if it decides to implode, it might save your turbo. Likewise an outer layer of polycarbonate probably is a good idea to keep your house glass free. And definitely check out the window on a polariscope fairly regularly. You want to know about creeping stresses and faults before it goes kaboom.
I wonder if you could put a polarised light source inside the chamber and look at the viewport through polarising film to visualise any stress concentrations?
Suggestions : build a ring around the viewport and have a grove with a Oring that way it won't be local pressure on the glass. And maybe build a plate that sits in front of the big vacuum pump. That way if any thing implodes it wouldn't hit the blades
that's the way the large windows on the chambers i use are mounted . putting anything in front of the pump slows it pumping speed down even a coerce screen will knot 10-20% of your capacity off. at such low pressure your in the free molecular region so thing stop acting like normal fluids.
That was my first plan. But getting a ring that size machined was prohibitively expensive. I plan on adding a shield in front of the pump, to protect it. It's also needed if I use the chamber for sputtering. Otherwise I will coat the blades.
@@AdvancedTinkering you would be shocked by how much metal can get plated on a turbo. we ran large EP test facility that ran metal propellant the walls had several hundred micron layers thick of various metals and the turbos were fine with no shields.
i know we all hate the "as long as a football field" comaprisons, but the energy 16k joule are very close to a .50 BMG round. and that is a useful comparison in/for my mind.
I should also say that with a pump that small and a chamber and high vacuum pump that large you will definitely run into molecular backflow of the oil from your foreline pump. Definitely recommend upgrading the size of the oil pump or getting your hands on a roots rotary pump. An Ebara or Kashiyama roots pump is ideal, can't recommend the Pfieffer ones as they are incredibly loud compared to their competition and far more expensive despite using older designs.
@@Currywurst-zo8oo The longer an oil pump is pumping on any chamber the more opportunity for molecular backflow of the oil. Larger chambers lead to faster degradation of the oil which in turn means the vapor pressure of the degraded oil increases. For large chambers a larger pump is recommended when using oil pumps. With smaller chambers the hydrocarbon contamination from oil is negligible but when pumping on a large chamber for extended periods it can easily become a problem for high purity applications.
Haha, there is no way I could get it into my basement. And as far as I understood the professor, they plan on using it as a display item in the university.
in my opinion, it looks very good with alternating black and silver clams. And, as a 4th year chemical student i am very fascinated by what have you done!😮😊 Hope to see more videos using this vacuum chamber.
Turbo pumps should never be mounted with claw clamps. They are nowhere near strong enough to hold the pump if it crashes. You should use a split clamp ring (2 clamp plates that wrap around the entire periphery) instead of more claw clamps. Borosilicate glass discs are usually rated to a specific pressure. 20mm seems borderline for a window that big, but I would not personally trust unqualified Chinese glass regardless. Glass by itself is pretty cheap - you should replace it with a high quality borosilicate disc with a rated pressure. 3D printed clamps on the glass is all good though - exactly what I was going to suggest before you got there. The light is quite a good idea too, but ideally you'll be lighting future pictures with plasma from...something? Sputter magnetron? Ion source? Evaporation? What's your plan for this chamber? You need to get a better roughing/backing pump though. Ideally you should be able to rough to 1 mTorr in less than 20-30 min, especially if you're going to be opening it more often to play with different setups. Then you can switch to your turbo and run process without waiting an eternity to rough between setup changes.
This chamber is a monster! Can't wait to see what projects you have planned for it. And that turbo is just nuts 😳 Definitely see if you can scrounge up a scroll pump, I'm so happy that I switched. Quiet, much faster than my rotary vane pump, and no oil vapor all over the shop. Took a while to find a good deal on ebay though, they don't seem nearly as common 😢
On the light clamp for the viewport you should add a conical shaped "lens" which stretches from the clamp to the glass that can help reduce any glare on the window itself from getting into the camera during recording
An issue I can see with this is it could dampen a good amount of the light if it's made of a dark material Though you could add aluminum tape or something on the inside as a crude reflective layer
- outside-in lighting is a great idea, maybe put some more leds around the window in the empty spots. - consider putting a polycarbonate sheet outside in front of the glass. possibly removable, so you can move it aside if you want to film. Does the BigPump need to be unobstructed inside the chamber? can you put something in front of it inside the chamber to protect it from becoming a viral video? As for what to do with the chamber? Maybe start a business vapor deposition coating whole pets? anything up to a dog would fit...
For someone that doesn’t have a lot of friends,you sure have a lot of friends 😂😂and with the free stuff you’re receiving you could get a student to help you out bro. Loved the video def subscribed
you could have used acrylic for the viewport, that stuff's used on deep sea submarines and can withstand more pressure than glass because it can flex slightly. but at least glass doesn't scratch and outgass under vacuum. I like the alternating silver and black clamps too.
Hey thats a cool new chamber. As other have suggested, add polycarb on the outside just in case. And perhaps go with a laminated glass solution. Id also suggest a cheap, light piece of glass on the inside, so sputtering or evaporants dont spoil your saftey glass. Satisloh just use a sprung wire, a bit like a circlip, to hold it in place. Id also suggest a smooth panel like a doughnut to cover the window clamps - only for cosmetics, and maybe to integrate a larger led light strip.
Yes, I'll probably attach a polycarbonate sheet in front of the window. For the inside, I plan to simply stick several layers of clear vinyl film onto the window, so I can peel off a layer when needed to have a clean view again. I'll also put a shield in front of the turbomolecular pump to prevent coating the rotor.
When you used your bare finger to spin that turbo I immediately recoiled as I have cut the tip of my finger off doing the exact same thing on a different Pfieffer turbo.
To help with the mounting of the pump and the issue you had with the wrench you can use crowfoot adapter on the torque wrench to tighten the bolts if they socket heads, just remember to turn the crow foot adapter 90* so the torque is correct based on the length of the tool... they add some length to the lever are and thus you need to be careful when using them to not over tighten fasteners. Hope this helps next time you need to get at a tricky fastener with a torque wrench.
To protect the pump could you put a blast shield in front of the compressor. That way any debris entering the pump in a failure situation would only be debris aspirated by the vein pump
two things. 1. get a wheeled bench to mount under the pump so when you need to remove it in the future you don't strain your back. 2. the 3d printed brackets could be replaced with a carbon fiber safety mesh that mounts in those spots just in case it ever does shatter. that way you can still remove it easily for filming and such and the brackets have a use. as far color? I wish they were all steel color.
12 clamps for the pump is fine. The mounting of the glass however is scary if you over or unevenly tighten it, removing the 3d printed ones probably increases stress.
You can get sockets that have a crescent head off to the side that you can use to tighten your pump clamps with the torque wrench. You have to adjust the torque to account for the increased tool length
It’s possible the 24 clamp count might have something to do with even loading of the turbine housing across a wide range of chamber pressures as well as safety in a crash scenario.
Parkers O-Ring Handbook is a must for sizing o-rings and grooves, really good for reverse engineering groves to find the correct o-ring to suit (assuming the groove was designed correctly in the first place)
Pick up a cheap used automotive engine lift..... They can be taken apart so they take up minimum space and it would make moving that heavy equipment around alot easier.
Ich find's so genial dass es Menschen wie dich und Platformen wie diese hier gibt die es Leuten mir erlaubt solchen Content zu genießen! bzgl des X1C ich hab mir kürzlich den gleichen Drucker gekauft, aus den gleichen Gründen wie du. Schau dass du nie langsamer als 150mm/s druckst wenn das Ergebnis hübsch sein soll, und druck die bitte unbedingt das Werkzeug aus mit dem man den Extruder zerlegen kann (ist so eine Befestigung auf die man den Extruder legt um eines seiner Zahnräder herauszuhämmern, anders bekommt man das Teil leider im Ernstfall echt nicht zerlegt)
Es freut mich sehr, dass dir die Videos/Projekte gefallen! Vielen Dank fürs ansehen! Und danke für den Tipp mit dem Werkzeug für den Extruder. Werde ich bei Gelegenheit drucken.
You might consider an easily removable layer of like 3mm glass inside the main window to take the deposition loads from sputtering etc. Though i do wonder if some laser cut mylar Knapton taped in front might be easier lol. +1 for the polycarbonate layer over your glass. If you can get the right glue you can probably make the optical connection disappear for your camera work. When you can't get the torque wrench in like that just use your spanner and say click as you do it. Quality certified😂
WOW! Looking at the place where your university dumps it's junk... I could never use the word "useless"... so many beautiful "toys", so little storage space in my office.
This is some incredible piece of machinery. I don't have much ideas on how to use it, but if you'll sell it for a down payment on a mortgage, I wouldn't blame you
With very careful bakeout and long pumpdown on an extra clean interior, I expect your ultimate pressure will be ~2-3e-7mbar as long as the roughing pump can support the foreline at >4e-2mbar. I tried zooming at 4k but was not able to make out the model number of it.
@AdvancedTinkering considering that the Duo supports a fore pressure of >1e-2mbar and the turbos final pressure is >1e-7mbar you should be able to quite easily achieve -6mbar range. I work with vacuum coating plants so watching your videos is a great pleasure ❤
2:40 The 16000 Nm is the torque which the pump is expected to produce in a crash. Although the torque units and the energy units coincide, the torque is not the energy. To spin the pump up requires 750 Watts for 480 seconds. This corresponds to the energy of 360000 Joules (equivalent to 86 grams of TNT). Of course, some of this goes into friction and other losses, so the energy stored in the rotor is somewhat less than that. But this number is in the right ballpark, and would roughly correspond to a 6 kg 300 mm diameter disk rotating at the nominal for this pump rpm.
Awesome turbopump!!!! From my point of view, using a solid glass for such a large window is not a good idea, as scratches on its surphase can reduce its strength a lot (up to 10 times!). In my project i use a 300 mm window made of 30 mm triplex (3*10 mm). From my point of view, triplex is more robust and suitable for such applications, as forces are more smoothly distributed)
a cool thing would exposing small objects, like an electrolytic cap, cocktail tomato, those small schokoladenschaumküsse, anyting that might be visually stimulating. but a small enough chamber so the dp is violent enough (lol). and maybe make the exhaust into the main chamber out of clear pipes, for nice Δp shots.
You are going to have fun! We use large machines at my work that run cryopumps. We routinely have 2.0x10-7 torr. The chambers are about 60" long x 24" across. Im sure you already know, but NEVER use anything made of brass in your system. It is a porous material and makes high vacuum practically impossible.
Please make sure the vacuum chamber is also secured properly. You wouldn't be the first one that secured your TMP to the chamber thinking that the weight of the chamber would stop it. Then have a TMP failure and see the chamber go flying through the room. Regarding getting to a lowest possible vacuüm, I don't know what the outgassing properties of super glue are, but I wouldn't suspect them to be that favourable. Further, the surface finish looks relatively rough, you could look into electro polishing it. This minimizes the surface area thus improving your vacuüm. I would love to see some experiments with RGA's. You can get some interesting data out of them
Don't run any Carbon Fiber or other abrasives through the AMS. Bambu recommends using an external spool due to the high wear on the internal Bowden tubes.
Very exiting indeed. Maybe you can prove (one way or the other) if photographic film is damaged by exposure to a vacuum? You could potentially prove that NASA was or was not telling fibs about the Apollo missions.....
Maybe the high vacuum company is supporting you because your channel is just a big promotion for premade systems with all the hard work it takes to do it even semi diy
You're living out my dreams with a giant vacuum chamber, hope you can do some cool experiments in it when it's ready. As for the turbo pump, you need a 'crows foot' wrench fitting so you can tighten the turbo clamps with a torque wrench without the body of the pump interfering with the torque wrench.
As for the windows, consider composite solution: glass + polycarbonate. I snatched this idea from Ben 'Applied Science' Kransoff and I really like it a lot.
Great video, I love the 3d printed clamps but I think you could get away with some dark nickel or something like brass to give it a better look. If you are willing to give it another go with the clamps, you can get some conductive filament (if they have it) or a conductive paint to try and make some nickel electroformed pieces. If you allow for holes in the design you can connect the exoskeleton together to form a basic few millimeters or centimeters of nickel to make it look better and be stronger too. Electroforming is thicker than plating, it becomes something that is much more functional. I tried writing a comment earlier but it got removed and I can't find it. But, basically it works out that there is a company in Norderstedt, Germany that does electroforming services called elektroform (I think maybe the link is what made it get removed) that I'm pretty sure would be able to do it for fairly cheap. It would probably be able to fill in gaps and clearances too in your chamber. I'm an anxiety guy about pressure point spreads. I'm sure you know, but the leverage and torsion from the given points of spread give a twist and bend from resonant frequencies that can act like a pump and move air in and or out, depending on factors like heat, thickness, material itself, occlusions, etc etc. Which is why I was thinking about it. Not so much for the clamps but for vibrational frequencies that create moments of intermittent issues that cause leaks when in operational use during specific operations but not others. I.e. a high electromagnetic load or current flow. Which lead me into writing about your thoughts on using small lasers to sputter micro areas that use positive charge forces from the given metal to adhere, like powder coating, to a negative point on the surface of a given material. You see, if you do that right in a vacuum using either lasers & or a high voltage application for a brief period of time it creates vaporization of the given material (I'm sure you know that already) but it goes everywhere. But! if you decide to use charge forces it can get captured much more easily, which lead me into thinking about using old tube tv technology (electromagnetic beam forming effectively) to force the vaporized metal (or material in general) to become more controlled, but then thinking about using simple macro sized accelerators for atoms and molecules to "hit" the material when sputtering occurs to force a high specific likelihood of alloy/compound formation that could be captured into a "pump", its really just a negative tube that accelerates the vaporized material using electromagnetic fields and electrostatic forces to magneto-hydrodynamic pump it around as an accelerator, to then be applied in highly specific nanometer/atom-ish sized areas using the equivalent of a electron microscope but in reverse. Measuring the charge makes it lower in a given area, so its much easier to deposit it specifically right there without needing to massively accelerate the material or use super expensive liquid gases to do it. Especially in a vacuum as strong as this is. Which makes it easier to vacuum electroform parts, with extremely fine details when and where needed. Basically making it possible to form engines, cars, clothes, electronics, transistors and computer chips in a vacuum electroform process that has exceedingly high accuracy, precision, and consistency with high volume production when used in a large multi-vacuum chamber combined together manufacturing process. All automated, it could use easier to acquire (cheaper as a result) chemical compound gas, liquid, & or solid technique to crash out individual elements & or alloys that can be added up over time. So its a viable vacuum 3d printing, electroforming, atom/molecule deposition manufacturing process. But, I planned on using a acid & alkaline battery setup (for the compounds) combined with a solar panel, wind, and piezoelectric (heat waste energy recapture) radiator generator setup for the thing to make it so it uses the electron movement and flow to do most of the work for crashing out and quickly sputtering & forming larger volumes of material to then have specific areas addressed for electronics and small nano-sized multi-substrated matrices (I hate words sometimes, too fancy, its just a bunch of puzzle pieces that are small and combined together but...whatever) that are chemically/ionically/electrically bonded together to form and whole piece. Like the engines, but the electronics inside would be thermophotovoltaics, thermoelectric materials, piezoelectrics, the wires for it, the insulation for it, the cooling channels for it, etc. Or for quantum super-positional computer chip ideas I have on my xenonreality youtube channel, using this to form easily made fullerenes with ultra compressed and hard compounds inside that are structured such that they make extremely hard, electrically conductive, and phonoically (vibrations basically) stable and specific transistors that form easily cooled via acoustic vibrational resonance which also forces the qbits inside of the fullerenes to form wave-guided field supported super positions that can be observed using light, electricity, & changes in phonon (vibration) frequencies for error correction. All while being in dense Faraday cages and easily denoised via basic cooling methods we already have, like phase change coolers that use acoustic pumps and electrically conductive refrigerant that helps create electromagnetic fields to denoise and electrostatic fields to denoise the area. They are conductive material after all, as well. So it can be made exponentially better at doing what huge massive systems do, with a vacuum 3d printing that allows for electroforming as well as atomic deposition on large scales for cheap like this. I was wondering what your take is on the idea of if you've ever considered it? Well, mostly because it's an old design idea on my xenonreality RUclips channel. If you ever want to use it just include my name in it please.
3:52 That stud looks like a nightmare. I run a the leak test lab for an aluminum ultra-high vacuum chamber manufacturer and we use helical inserts (helicoils). I've installed literally tens of thousands of them without nearly as much work. They can be tricky with out the install tool but a bolt works decently. I was curious about your gasket lays; did you leave them with that circular lay? or did you place a parallel scratch pattern and just not film it?
Yeah, I should have used helicoils. Now I know for the next time I'm using thread inserts. The "scratches" were so fine, I didn't think it would be necessary to sand it parallel to the o-ring. But I will probably still do it in the future.
The manual doesn't specify a 16000 joule, but 16000 newton*meter, a torque. That is the worst case crash torque that will last several milliseconds. If your flange clamping is not sufficient (or the adapter flange to vessel bolts) the torque will shear off the bolts and the spinning rotor (now fused to the outer casing) will spin freely at the mind boggling speed it runs at, and it will take off through your lab. Now the worst case crash torque is an exceptional situation (a "bell burst", the rotor splitting into a few parts) and I've seen some turbo's in academia without any crash torque considerations, so choose your approach. Another consideration is the rotational intertia of the rotor vs the rotational intertia of your vessel. Even with a 1000:1 ratio, it can mean your rotor at 31500 rpm will make your setup spin at 31.5 rpm after a crash around rotor axis. Perhaps worthwhile to quickly check if anchoring to the ground is needed. If you sand flanges, see if you can get the sanding grooves parallel to the o-ring, a slightly smaller change that leaks. The mounting of the pump looks very familiar, I have a 60 kg turbo I should start repairing. It is indeed a pain to lift alone :P
project idea : -put a LED laser cutter inside and use it to cut/engrave some materials, lack of air/oxygen should give some interesting results -perform vacuum welding of clean metal objects
I actually have plans on using a laser inside a vacuum chamber (for pulsed laser deposition). Trying laser welding would also be interesting. Thanks for the idea!
i'd be keen to see plasma in the chamber nothing comes to mind more than the smarter everyday and impreza plasma sphere or ion propulsion. perhaps Nile could offer some interesting chemicals that behave safely under such conditions or backyard scientist for some cool lazers
im curious what some plants and a bunch of bugs look like after a few days in a vac. Supposedly some microorganisms will survive, would be interesting to see what kind of ecosystems can develop and thrive in these conditions
Awesome video, I have made large scientific vacuum chambers and other physics kit before, Few useful tips. Phosphor bronze helicoils are great for aluminium tapped threads, these normally come with a specific tap for pre tapping the hole prior to putting the helicoil in which requires way less torque, also you can remove them easily should the worst happen. Low -5s is pretty decent considering the roughing pump is quite small and is a rotary vane oil pump, be careful with experiments that might create a cold surface in the chamber as this can cause oil to be pumped back through the pump contaminating the turbo pump and chamber. Low -6s is probably the best you will be able to achieve with standard o-ring seals and kf /iso flanges, Viton and nitrile orings become pourous to some gasses at these pressures so you would need copper gasket seal to get lower ideally (cf flanges). But seeing as that pump is such a beast perhaps you could get to the low 7s, you can get “strainers” / mesh grid o rings for the dn260 pumps, doesn’t really affect the pumping speed but will stop a stray bolt from going into the pump. Again awesome content, most university physics labs will have loads of pumps, vacuum systems and cryogenic equipment ect that are just collecting dust (I have seen this to be the case multiple times) great source of kit if you ask nicely
Thank you! Yes, I plan on adding a shield in front of the pump. A special mesh for the flange would be too expensive but I will see if I can get something made from stainless sheet metal. If I reach low -6s I am absolutely happy.
To reach higher vacuum, ususally it helps to run the rough pump overnight. Water and other volatiles sticks to the walls. Baking helps, but it is a real hassle. Flushing with argon helps too. But that is a bit expensive method. Ps. That is not the biggest turbomolecular pump I have seen. We have one as big as me when sitting down at work. :D
Yeah, I have no idea how I would heat a chamber that size. So running the pump for a long time seems to be the only option. Haha, yes, there are far bigger ones :D
Why not make the 3D printed clamps wide enough so they bridge the whole space between the aluminium clamps? That would then add some (impact) protection to the window the whole way around, since they don’t really work as clamps properly anyway I guess (much less stiff and strong than the aluminium ones, so those take the load).
In an electro trash dumpster at my university I have found a perfectly fine working GC-FID machine from Agilent or a small turbo [pump with controller xD It is a gold mine sometimes.
Will you not have out-gassing problems using Aluminium, and we always use gasket cord to make o-rings, as long as you cut it square and use fine emery paper to smooth it you won't have any problems
Okay, just to save you from disaster: a safety margin of 2 is completely insufficient for glass. Make that at least 5 -10. The problem is not the bulk strength of the material, it's about tensile stress at the edges of the glass. Any small crack (for example from diamond tooling) can quickly grow under these conditions, leading to catastrophic failure, destruction of your chamber and vacuum system. Not to mention serious personal hazards. Buy a much thicker disk or better, decrease the window size. Or even better : both. With this 20mm window you will never feel / be safe, even if it does not crack immediately!
But think of the RUclips content!
20mm sounds about right for window that size, the chamber i use has several 200mm windows and those are only 10mm thick 300mm would only be bit more than double the force.
A factor of 5-10 is probably still insufficient, considering the glass was purchased from Alibaba. Saving money should be low priority when it comes to safety or risk of damage to a far more expensive vacuum pump.
@@bobweiram6321 You are clueless. Just because its probably made in China doesnt mean its poor quality.
what about poly carb?
If the manual suggests 22 clamps for the pump but you only added 12, wouldn't it be easy to drill 12 more holes in between the existing ones to allow for 24 clamps? That's even better than 22
I don't have a drill press in my workshop. And doing it by hand would have resulted in crooked holes. Additionally I spoke with some people with experience and they said 12 clamps are sufficient.
But you are right, the best solution would have been to add more holes.
@@AdvancedTinkering You don't need a drill press to drill straight holes. In fact, it doesn't guarantee straightness. You need to make a guide block with an appropriate sized bushing.
@@AdvancedTinkering cmon man i know it's risky but it is possible to drill 12 holes straight by hand especially if you made a drill guide. just a piece of stock squared on both sides with a hole at tap drill size through it it. clamp drill guide where you want holes and go ham.
@@AdvancedTinkering get a drill press! it's $89 on harbor freight. it's not a 5-axis cnc mill haha.
We have a sputter machine which had a large round glass window on a round sample transfer chamber at our institute. The diameter was about 80cm and the thickness about one inch or 2.5 cm. One night - luckily with nobody around - the glass imploded, after more than 20 years of service life. There was glass splinters everywhere.
I have no doubt that 20mm might be sufficient, but given the origin and transport of your glass window, there might be internal stresses etc.
At least mount a thick acrylic or polycarbonat sheet in front of the window!
That is frightening. I'm probably adding a polycarbonate sheet in front of the window. Shouldn't be much work and make it a lot safer.
Glass under strain is a scary thing; all it takes is a little crack, under tension, and away it goes. On the upside, it can be visualized with polarized light; strain twists the polarization, add interference and funky colors result. Not that this will be conclusive, but if it's very uniform (and, when pumped down, it should have a nice even circular gradient?), that's at least encouraging.
@@AdvancedTinkeringyeah glass explodes like a bomb under a lot of stress think prince ruports drop but with more energy.
At my workplace we had a turbomolecular pump connected to a mass spectrometer simply explode about a week ago. If the outer Cover (which was in place for such a case) hadn't held up it would have sent shrapnel flying everywhere around the room. I don't even wanna imagine the damage to all the other sensitive equipment in the room or what would have happened to anyone that could have been in the room at the time.
Interesting. I was told the housing of the turbomolecular pump is capable of catching any shrapnel from the blades.
@@AdvancedTinkering Yeah, that's what I meant to say by outer cover (english sometimes uh), they purposely make the housing in a way that can withstand shrapnel and it did successfully stop them in our case
Sorry for being unclear there
Hahahaha I work in a semi fab, we very rarely ever use torque wrenches (only in torque critical locations, like acrylic windows, special bushings, etc.), most of the time we use SHCS with L wrenches (allen keys) so that everything is only ever hand tight, if we do use wrenches we just go until snug (vacuum pulls everything together anyway, and if it doesn't going tighter is not a good idea as you likely have another issue like a poor seal surface or misalignment).
Edit: oh and a lot of this kind of equipment is stainless, stainless galls like a SOB so using hand tools where you can feel any resistance early and STOP is critical, I've seen a quarter inch stainless bolt seize on 2 to 3 threads to the point it snapped in half rather than budge. It's a real pain to drill out and add inserts. If you have something you can't afford to break I'd recommend splurging on the silver plating, it prevents the galling.
Yea - I worked in capital vacuum equipment for several years and we never once used a torque wrench. Hand tight works for pretty much everything. The bolts are usually torqued to create a seal which is at least an order of magnitude less than what is required to create a structural joint. We also sprayed absolutely every bolt with sulphur dioxide or slathered really big bolts with moly antiseize cuz yea - stainless LOVES to seize up on itself.
1:34 consider using a maroon or other fine scotchbrite and make linear motion along the path of the seal, making a "race track" finish. Otherwise the rotary device shown in the video will make perpendicular scratches along the length of the O-ring surface.
As you seem to be well versed with vacuum fittings: Is a race track finish or a polished surface better for sealing? Two friends, both engineers, argued abut that recently, and as I personally have no qualified opinion on the topic, I hereby resort to asking competent sounding strangers on the internet. Thanks in advance!
@viatorsimplex4524 idk about the op, but I work with vacuum devices every day at work, the higher quality a part is the more mirror like the polish is on the sealing surface. I've never seen a grooved sealing surface on vacuum fittings, the only place I've seen that is on cheap mass produced plastic fittings (like screw caps on bottles or cheap garden hose pieces etc.). The only professional vacuum equivalent would be metal-metal seals, like conflat or vcr, but in those cases the metal bites into a disposable metal seal washer. Perhaps they're thinking of triclamp? Those aren't vacuum fittings but they look very similar to kf fittings at a glance, they have a groove that fits a Teflon (generally) sealing washer.
@viatorsimplex4524 if brand new, an Ra 0.4 um or less is great. In this case he is reworking by hand. My comment is with respect to this particular case.
@@xxportalxx. The discussion between my two friends was about the fittings for a self-built vacuum chamber. Our self-turned KF fittings (with appropriate O-rings) initially had a subpar, but, due to turning, inherently "race tracked" finish, that worked surprisingly well considering how bad it looked. Our requirements for final vacuum were not that high (otherwise we would have used metal seals or just welded it shut with a drop of indium), so the discussion was mostly academic. I gave the flat parts a quick polish on the diamond disk and a lap to see whether there was a difference in final vacuum. Polishing to a mirror finish (with no marks visible under 20x Magnification, suggesting an N well below 4 or Ra well below 0.2 µm) showed no difference in our case, but we were likely limited by our pump anyway. Thus the question - and thank you for your answer.
@@nickj2508 Thank you very much, that was the answer I was was hoping for.
I like the alternating clamps
Congratulations on becoming a professional mechanic. We are all very proud of you.🎉🎉🎉
He’s not cussing enough or throwing enough tools to be a professional just yet 😂
If you can do it, replace the machined and 3D printed clamps with a solid ring. The 3D printed clamps are a mute point in my opinion, the creep resistance of 3D printed pastics is just not enough to provide any actual clamping force. The glass used for the port seems significant at a safety factor of 2, but considering the surface area I would have been around 3-4 SF. Sucking down a chamber this big is always time consuming, what I do for my welding chamber is store vaccum in a welding bottle. The stored vacuum can build in the backround as I work on other things then when it is time to bring down the anti chamber before the initial argon purge I just dump vacuum from the tank.
The 3D-printed clamps are purely for aesthetic purposes and don’t serve any real function. The window is only held on by the aluminum clamps. A solid ring was my first idea as well, but having one made in that size would have been too expensive for me.
By the way, "storing" vacuum in a welding bottle or another container is actually a pretty clever idea!
totally keep the alternating clamps, they form quite a nice asthetic, as well as helping the light blend in. Great work on the video, It's terrific as usual!
The template for machining screw insert holes
The o-ring, the 3D printed clasps, and all of your reminders of how a molecular pump explodes
So much space for activities!
The black and silver clamps looks awesome! Black&Silver - sounds like a new cocktail name.
I would put a polycarbonate shield on the INSIDE of the chamber over the window, to catch any inward-flying glass shards if it decides to implode, it might save your turbo. Likewise an outer layer of polycarbonate probably is a good idea to keep your house glass free. And definitely check out the window on a polariscope fairly regularly. You want to know about creeping stresses and faults before it goes kaboom.
I wonder if you could put a polarised light source inside the chamber and look at the viewport through polarising film to visualise any stress concentrations?
I thought about that but since the glass is tempered I think it allready is full of stress. Might be worth a try anyways.
8:09 love that this joke works all over! We are all just 13yo boys at heart
As always you do an awesome job, glad you are getting recognition with sponsors. Stuff like yours is what makes youtube worth watching! thank you
Suggestions : build a ring around the viewport and have a grove with a Oring that way it won't be local pressure on the glass. And maybe build a plate that sits in front of the big vacuum pump. That way if any thing implodes it wouldn't hit the blades
that's the way the large windows on the chambers i use are mounted . putting anything in front of the pump slows it pumping speed down even a coerce screen will knot 10-20% of your capacity off. at such low pressure your in the free molecular region so thing stop acting like normal fluids.
That was my first plan. But getting a ring that size machined was prohibitively expensive.
I plan on adding a shield in front of the pump, to protect it. It's also needed if I use the chamber for sputtering. Otherwise I will coat the blades.
@@AdvancedTinkering you would be shocked by how much metal can get plated on a turbo. we ran large EP test facility that ran metal propellant the walls had several hundred micron layers thick of various metals and the turbos were fine with no shields.
i know we all hate the "as long as a football field" comaprisons, but the energy 16k joule are very close to a .50 BMG round. and that is a useful comparison in/for my mind.
That's indeed a very nice and impressive comparison!
I should also say that with a pump that small and a chamber and high vacuum pump that large you will definitely run into molecular backflow of the oil from your foreline pump. Definitely recommend upgrading the size of the oil pump or getting your hands on a roots rotary pump. An Ebara or Kashiyama roots pump is ideal, can't recommend the Pfieffer ones as they are incredibly loud compared to their competition and far more expensive despite using older designs.
Why does the pump size matter in this case? Shouldn't the size only affect the time it takes to achieve a rough vacuum.
@@Currywurst-zo8oo The longer an oil pump is pumping on any chamber the more opportunity for molecular backflow of the oil. Larger chambers lead to faster degradation of the oil which in turn means the vapor pressure of the degraded oil increases. For large chambers a larger pump is recommended when using oil pumps. With smaller chambers the hydrocarbon contamination from oil is negligible but when pumping on a large chamber for extended periods it can easily become a problem for high purity applications.
you NEED to get the big one
Haha, there is no way I could get it into my basement. And as far as I understood the professor, they plan on using it as a display item in the university.
in my opinion, it looks very good with alternating black and silver clams.
And, as a 4th year chemical student i am very fascinated by what have you done!😮😊
Hope to see more videos using this vacuum chamber.
0:16 haha e-waste dumpster driving, my source of hardware gems as well. No idea why people throw away perfectly working computers :D
I would have cut up the large chamber for the aluminum! Nice big machinable slabs that cost a fortune from metal suppliers.
As an IT guy, I can partially answer that : I cannot take all of them home. Not enough space
That chamber looks *awesome*. Looking forward to seeing what you’ll be doing with it!
Turbo pumps should never be mounted with claw clamps. They are nowhere near strong enough to hold the pump if it crashes. You should use a split clamp ring (2 clamp plates that wrap around the entire periphery) instead of more claw clamps. Borosilicate glass discs are usually rated to a specific pressure. 20mm seems borderline for a window that big, but I would not personally trust unqualified Chinese glass regardless. Glass by itself is pretty cheap - you should replace it with a high quality borosilicate disc with a rated pressure. 3D printed clamps on the glass is all good though - exactly what I was going to suggest before you got there. The light is quite a good idea too, but ideally you'll be lighting future pictures with plasma from...something? Sputter magnetron? Ion source? Evaporation? What's your plan for this chamber? You need to get a better roughing/backing pump though. Ideally you should be able to rough to 1 mTorr in less than 20-30 min, especially if you're going to be opening it more often to play with different setups. Then you can switch to your turbo and run process without waiting an eternity to rough between setup changes.
This chamber is a monster! Can't wait to see what projects you have planned for it. And that turbo is just nuts 😳 Definitely see if you can scrounge up a scroll pump, I'm so happy that I switched. Quiet, much faster than my rotary vane pump, and no oil vapor all over the shop. Took a while to find a good deal on ebay though, they don't seem nearly as common 😢
Hello from Massachusetts USA! My fav chem channel
this project is incredible, congratulations
Thank you!
On the light clamp for the viewport you should add a conical shaped "lens" which stretches from the clamp to the glass that can help reduce any glare on the window itself from getting into the camera during recording
An issue I can see with this is it could dampen a good amount of the light if it's made of a dark material
Though you could add aluminum tape or something on the inside as a crude reflective layer
What a lucky to find all these materials
- outside-in lighting is a great idea, maybe put some more leds around the window in the empty spots.
- consider putting a polycarbonate sheet outside in front of the glass. possibly removable, so you can move it aside if you want to film.
Does the BigPump need to be unobstructed inside the chamber?
can you put something in front of it inside the chamber to protect it from becoming a viral video?
As for what to do with the chamber?
Maybe start a business vapor deposition coating whole pets? anything up to a dog would fit...
For someone that doesn’t have a lot of friends,you sure have a lot of friends 😂😂and with the free stuff you’re receiving you could get a student to help you out bro. Loved the video def subscribed
you could have used acrylic for the viewport, that stuff's used on deep sea submarines and can withstand more pressure than glass because it can flex slightly. but at least glass doesn't scratch and outgass under vacuum. I like the alternating silver and black clamps too.
Yes, I thought about acrylic but decided against it due to the outgassing. It would be much safer thought.
@@AdvancedTinkering Could double layer it? Like bulletproof glass?
Acrylic on the outside for safety if the glass on the inside pops?
I like the Black/Silver on the window.
There is special vacuum grease for sealing rings that you might want consieder using :)
Hey thats a cool new chamber. As other have suggested, add polycarb on the outside just in case.
And perhaps go with a laminated glass solution.
Id also suggest a cheap, light piece of glass on the inside, so sputtering or evaporants dont spoil your saftey glass. Satisloh just use a sprung wire, a bit like a circlip, to hold it in place.
Id also suggest a smooth panel like a doughnut to cover the window clamps - only for cosmetics, and maybe to integrate a larger led light strip.
Yes, I'll probably attach a polycarbonate sheet in front of the window. For the inside, I plan to simply stick several layers of clear vinyl film onto the window, so I can peel off a layer when needed to have a clean view again. I'll also put a shield in front of the turbomolecular pump to prevent coating the rotor.
When you used your bare finger to spin that turbo I immediately recoiled as I have cut the tip of my finger off doing the exact same thing on a different Pfieffer turbo.
Yeah, the blades are surprisingly sharp. Hope your finger recovered!
@@AdvancedTinkering Definitely not the worst injury on the job lol.
Du bist ein Genie. Sehr viel Wissen und Können, richtig stark. Videos sind super gemacht also gleich ein Like
To help with the mounting of the pump and the issue you had with the wrench you can use crowfoot adapter on the torque wrench to tighten the bolts if they socket heads, just remember to turn the crow foot adapter 90* so the torque is correct based on the length of the tool... they add some length to the lever are and thus you need to be careful when using them to not over tighten fasteners. Hope this helps next time you need to get at a tricky fastener with a torque wrench.
This is huge. I can’t wait to see how this develops!
Crow's foot wrench adaptor for those inset bolts.
To protect the pump could you put a blast shield in front of the compressor. That way any debris entering the pump in a failure situation would only be debris aspirated by the vein pump
two things. 1. get a wheeled bench to mount under the pump so when you need to remove it in the future you don't strain your back.
2. the 3d printed brackets could be replaced with a carbon fiber safety mesh that mounts in those spots just in case it ever does shatter. that way you can still remove it easily for filming and such and the brackets have a use. as far color? I wish they were all steel color.
12 clamps for the pump is fine.
The mounting of the glass however is scary if you over or unevenly tighten it, removing the 3d printed ones probably increases stress.
You can get sockets that have a crescent head off to the side that you can use to tighten your pump clamps with the torque wrench. You have to adjust the torque to account for the increased tool length
Impressive AF
It’s possible the 24 clamp count might have something to do with even loading of the turbine housing across a wide range of chamber pressures as well as safety in a crash scenario.
Parkers O-Ring Handbook is a must for sizing o-rings and grooves, really good for reverse engineering groves to find the correct o-ring to suit (assuming the groove was designed correctly in the first place)
Pick up a cheap used automotive engine lift..... They can be taken apart so they take up minimum space and it would make moving that heavy equipment around alot easier.
Should have hit the gym for 3-6 months before attempting to mount the pump
Ich find's so genial dass es Menschen wie dich und Platformen wie diese hier gibt die es Leuten mir erlaubt solchen Content zu genießen! bzgl des X1C ich hab mir kürzlich den gleichen Drucker gekauft, aus den gleichen Gründen wie du. Schau dass du nie langsamer als 150mm/s druckst wenn das Ergebnis hübsch sein soll, und druck die bitte unbedingt das Werkzeug aus mit dem man den Extruder zerlegen kann (ist so eine Befestigung auf die man den Extruder legt um eines seiner Zahnräder herauszuhämmern, anders bekommt man das Teil leider im Ernstfall echt nicht zerlegt)
Es freut mich sehr, dass dir die Videos/Projekte gefallen! Vielen Dank fürs ansehen!
Und danke für den Tipp mit dem Werkzeug für den Extruder. Werde ich bei Gelegenheit drucken.
You might consider an easily removable layer of like 3mm glass inside the main window to take the deposition loads from sputtering etc. Though i do wonder if some laser cut mylar Knapton taped in front might be easier lol.
+1 for the polycarbonate layer over your glass. If you can get the right glue you can probably make the optical connection disappear for your camera work.
When you can't get the torque wrench in like that just use your spanner and say click as you do it. Quality certified😂
WOW! Looking at the place where your university dumps it's junk... I could never use the word "useless"... so many beautiful "toys", so little storage space in my office.
awsome find
Yes, it really is! Very grateful the professor gave it to me.
Your brilliant my friend. Beautiful chamber! So jealous!
This is some incredible piece of machinery. I don't have much ideas on how to use it, but if you'll sell it for a down payment on a mortgage, I wouldn't blame you
With very careful bakeout and long pumpdown on an extra clean interior, I expect your ultimate pressure will be ~2-3e-7mbar as long as the roughing pump can support the foreline at >4e-2mbar. I tried zooming at 4k but was not able to make out the model number of it.
It is a Pfeiffer Duo 2.5. If i get down to -6 in the chamber, I'm absolutely fine with that.
@AdvancedTinkering considering that the Duo supports a fore pressure of >1e-2mbar and the turbos final pressure is >1e-7mbar you should be able to quite easily achieve -6mbar range. I work with vacuum coating plants so watching your videos is a great pleasure ❤
@@AdvancedTinkering unless you have some very specific applications in mind, most experiments can be done between 2e-5mbar and 5e-6mbar 😉
2:40 The 16000 Nm is the torque which the pump is expected to produce in a crash. Although the torque units and the energy units coincide, the torque is not the energy.
To spin the pump up requires 750 Watts for 480 seconds. This corresponds to the energy of 360000 Joules (equivalent to 86 grams of TNT). Of course, some of this goes into friction and other losses, so the energy stored in the rotor is somewhat less than that. But this number is in the right ballpark, and would roughly correspond to a 6 kg 300 mm diameter disk rotating at the nominal for this pump rpm.
Now use the torque wrench to set one bolt to 10.0, the next one to 11.6, the next one to 8.4, the next one to 9.4, and so on. Best of both worlds.
Awesome turbopump!!!!
From my point of view, using a solid glass for such a large window is not a good idea, as scratches on its surphase can reduce its strength a lot (up to 10 times!). In my project i use a 300 mm window made of 30 mm triplex (3*10 mm). From my point of view, triplex is more robust and suitable for such applications, as forces are more smoothly distributed)
Thanks for the recommendation! May I ask how much you paid for a window that size?
@@AdvancedTinkering I ordered it at some glass-treatment firm in Moscow
a few years ago. I payed about 100 bucks for 370 mm wide window
a cool thing would exposing small objects, like an electrolytic cap, cocktail tomato, those small schokoladenschaumküsse, anyting that might be visually stimulating. but a small enough chamber so the dp is violent enough (lol). and maybe make the exhaust into the main chamber out of clear pipes, for nice Δp shots.
You are going to have fun! We use large machines at my work that run cryopumps. We routinely have 2.0x10-7 torr. The chambers are about 60" long x 24" across. Im sure you already know, but NEVER use anything made of brass in your system. It is a porous material and makes high vacuum practically impossible.
Please make sure the vacuum chamber is also secured properly. You wouldn't be the first one that secured your TMP to the chamber thinking that the weight of the chamber would stop it. Then have a TMP failure and see the chamber go flying through the room. Regarding getting to a lowest possible vacuüm, I don't know what the outgassing properties of super glue are, but I wouldn't suspect them to be that favourable. Further, the surface finish looks relatively rough, you could look into electro polishing it. This minimizes the surface area thus improving your vacuüm. I would love to see some experiments with RGA's. You can get some interesting data out of them
Don't run any Carbon Fiber or other abrasives through the AMS. Bambu recommends using an external spool due to the high wear on the internal Bowden tubes.
Amazing. All the best for your experiments.
amazing man.
Thanks!
Very exiting indeed.
Maybe you can prove (one way or the other) if photographic film is damaged by exposure to a vacuum?
You could potentially prove that NASA was or was not telling fibs about the Apollo missions.....
Instad of adding window maybe better will be just instaling camera inside, less cool but much simpler
Many cameras overheat and or off gas in vaccum conditions
@@nikolausluhrs why not make the viewing port fit a thicc fisheye lense, and have the camera body located outside ?
Maybe the high vacuum company is supporting you because your channel is just a big promotion for premade systems with all the hard work it takes to do it even semi diy
You're living out my dreams with a giant vacuum chamber, hope you can do some cool experiments in it when it's ready.
As for the turbo pump, you need a 'crows foot' wrench fitting so you can tighten the turbo clamps with a torque wrench without the body of the pump interfering with the torque wrench.
Plasma vapors deposit on some drill bit with some Titanium nitrate would be great
Amazing dude !
Thanks!
Still waiting for you to share the build information on your vacuum gauges.
PS : I like the black and silver clamps. Serves the purpose.
As for the windows, consider composite solution: glass + polycarbonate. I snatched this idea from Ben 'Applied Science' Kransoff and I really like it a lot.
Oh boy, the future looks bright. Can you put more lights on outside maybe at 12, 3, and 9 o'clock?
thanks for all the inspiring videos 👍
Great video, I love the 3d printed clamps but I think you could get away with some dark nickel or something like brass to give it a better look. If you are willing to give it another go with the clamps, you can get some conductive filament (if they have it) or a conductive paint to try and make some nickel electroformed pieces. If you allow for holes in the design you can connect the exoskeleton together to form a basic few millimeters or centimeters of nickel to make it look better and be stronger too. Electroforming is thicker than plating, it becomes something that is much more functional.
I tried writing a comment earlier but it got removed and I can't find it. But, basically it works out that there is a company in Norderstedt, Germany that does electroforming services called elektroform (I think maybe the link is what made it get removed) that I'm pretty sure would be able to do it for fairly cheap. It would probably be able to fill in gaps and clearances too in your chamber. I'm an anxiety guy about pressure point spreads. I'm sure you know, but the leverage and torsion from the given points of spread give a twist and bend from resonant frequencies that can act like a pump and move air in and or out, depending on factors like heat, thickness, material itself, occlusions, etc etc. Which is why I was thinking about it. Not so much for the clamps but for vibrational frequencies that create moments of intermittent issues that cause leaks when in operational use during specific operations but not others.
I.e. a high electromagnetic load or current flow. Which lead me into writing about your thoughts on using small lasers to sputter micro areas that use positive charge forces from the given metal to adhere, like powder coating, to a negative point on the surface of a given material. You see, if you do that right in a vacuum using either lasers & or a high voltage application for a brief period of time it creates vaporization of the given material (I'm sure you know that already) but it goes everywhere. But! if you decide to use charge forces it can get captured much more easily, which lead me into thinking about using old tube tv technology (electromagnetic beam forming effectively) to force the vaporized metal (or material in general) to become more controlled, but then thinking about using simple macro sized accelerators for atoms and molecules to "hit" the material when sputtering occurs to force a high specific likelihood of alloy/compound formation that could be captured into a "pump", its really just a negative tube that accelerates the vaporized material using electromagnetic fields and electrostatic forces to magneto-hydrodynamic pump it around as an accelerator, to then be applied in highly specific nanometer/atom-ish sized areas using the equivalent of a electron microscope but in reverse. Measuring the charge makes it lower in a given area, so its much easier to deposit it specifically right there without needing to massively accelerate the material or use super expensive liquid gases to do it. Especially in a vacuum as strong as this is. Which makes it easier to vacuum electroform parts, with extremely fine details when and where needed.
Basically making it possible to form engines, cars, clothes, electronics, transistors and computer chips in a vacuum electroform process that has exceedingly high accuracy, precision, and consistency with high volume production when used in a large multi-vacuum chamber combined together manufacturing process. All automated, it could use easier to acquire (cheaper as a result) chemical compound gas, liquid, & or solid technique to crash out individual elements & or alloys that can be added up over time. So its a viable vacuum 3d printing, electroforming, atom/molecule deposition manufacturing process. But, I planned on using a acid & alkaline battery setup (for the compounds) combined with a solar panel, wind, and piezoelectric (heat waste energy recapture) radiator generator setup for the thing to make it so it uses the electron movement and flow to do most of the work for crashing out and quickly sputtering & forming larger volumes of material to then have specific areas addressed for electronics and small nano-sized multi-substrated matrices (I hate words sometimes, too fancy, its just a bunch of puzzle pieces that are small and combined together but...whatever) that are chemically/ionically/electrically bonded together to form and whole piece. Like the engines, but the electronics inside would be thermophotovoltaics, thermoelectric materials, piezoelectrics, the wires for it, the insulation for it, the cooling channels for it, etc. Or for quantum super-positional computer chip ideas I have on my xenonreality youtube channel, using this to form easily made fullerenes with ultra compressed and hard compounds inside that are structured such that they make extremely hard, electrically conductive, and phonoically (vibrations basically) stable and specific transistors that form easily cooled via acoustic vibrational resonance which also forces the qbits inside of the fullerenes to form wave-guided field supported super positions that can be observed using light, electricity, & changes in phonon (vibration) frequencies for error correction. All while being in dense Faraday cages and easily denoised via basic cooling methods we already have, like phase change coolers that use acoustic pumps and electrically conductive refrigerant that helps create electromagnetic fields to denoise and electrostatic fields to denoise the area. They are conductive material after all, as well. So it can be made exponentially better at doing what huge massive systems do, with a vacuum 3d printing that allows for electroforming as well as atomic deposition on large scales for cheap like this.
I was wondering what your take is on the idea of if you've ever considered it? Well, mostly because it's an old design idea on my xenonreality RUclips channel. If you ever want to use it just include my name in it please.
Awesome vacuum chamber, I personally don't like the 3D printed clamps, otherwise really nice, my suggestion maybe get a bigger rotary vane vacuum pump
Cool, o-ring splicing should be a scarf joint, not a butt joint. 👍
I would assume, that doing it by hand could introduce more imperfections than butt joint.
3:52 That stud looks like a nightmare. I run a the leak test lab for an aluminum ultra-high vacuum chamber manufacturer and we use helical inserts (helicoils). I've installed literally tens of thousands of them without nearly as much work. They can be tricky with out the install tool but a bolt works decently.
I was curious about your gasket lays; did you leave them with that circular lay? or did you place a parallel scratch pattern and just not film it?
Yeah, I should have used helicoils. Now I know for the next time I'm using thread inserts.
The "scratches" were so fine, I didn't think it would be necessary to sand it parallel to the o-ring. But I will probably still do it in the future.
What an adventure 😊
I love the sound at 13:10, it sounds like something from Half-Life 1.
The manual doesn't specify a 16000 joule, but 16000 newton*meter, a torque. That is the worst case crash torque that will last several milliseconds. If your flange clamping is not sufficient (or the adapter flange to vessel bolts) the torque will shear off the bolts and the spinning rotor (now fused to the outer casing) will spin freely at the mind boggling speed it runs at, and it will take off through your lab.
Now the worst case crash torque is an exceptional situation (a "bell burst", the rotor splitting into a few parts) and I've seen some turbo's in academia without any crash torque considerations, so choose your approach.
Another consideration is the rotational intertia of the rotor vs the rotational intertia of your vessel. Even with a 1000:1 ratio, it can mean your rotor at 31500 rpm will make your setup spin at 31.5 rpm after a crash around rotor axis. Perhaps worthwhile to quickly check if anchoring to the ground is needed.
If you sand flanges, see if you can get the sanding grooves parallel to the o-ring, a slightly smaller change that leaks.
The mounting of the pump looks very familiar, I have a 60 kg turbo I should start repairing. It is indeed a pain to lift alone :P
project idea :
-put a LED laser cutter inside and use it to cut/engrave some materials, lack of air/oxygen should give some interesting results
-perform vacuum welding of clean metal objects
I actually have plans on using a laser inside a vacuum chamber (for pulsed laser deposition). Trying laser welding would also be interesting. Thanks for the idea!
i'd be keen to see plasma in the chamber nothing comes to mind more than the smarter everyday and impreza plasma sphere or ion propulsion. perhaps Nile could offer some interesting chemicals that behave safely under such conditions or backyard scientist for some cool lazers
im curious what some plants and a bunch of bugs look like after a few days in a vac. Supposedly some microorganisms will survive, would be interesting to see what kind of ecosystems can develop and thrive in these conditions
Awesome video, I have made large scientific vacuum chambers and other physics kit before,
Few useful tips. Phosphor bronze helicoils are great for aluminium tapped threads, these normally come with a specific tap for pre tapping the hole prior to putting the helicoil in which requires way less torque, also you can remove them easily should the worst happen.
Low -5s is pretty decent considering the roughing pump is quite small and is a rotary vane oil pump, be careful with experiments that might create a cold surface in the chamber as this can cause oil to be pumped back through the pump contaminating the turbo pump and chamber. Low -6s is probably the best you will be able to achieve with standard o-ring seals and kf /iso flanges, Viton and nitrile orings become pourous to some gasses at these pressures so you would need copper gasket seal to get lower ideally (cf flanges). But seeing as that pump is such a beast perhaps you could get to the low 7s, you can get “strainers” / mesh grid o rings for the dn260 pumps, doesn’t really affect the pumping speed but will stop a stray bolt from going into the pump.
Again awesome content, most university physics labs will have loads of pumps, vacuum systems and cryogenic equipment ect that are just collecting dust (I have seen this to be the case multiple times) great source of kit if you ask nicely
Thank you! Yes, I plan on adding a shield in front of the pump. A special mesh for the flange would be too expensive but I will see if I can get something made from stainless sheet metal.
If I reach low -6s I am absolutely happy.
Modified pasta strainers work pretty good
I'd love to see some ionic propulsion tests
Great video
Thanks!
To reach higher vacuum, ususally it helps to run the rough pump overnight. Water and other volatiles sticks to the walls. Baking helps, but it is a real hassle.
Flushing with argon helps too. But that is a bit expensive method.
Ps. That is not the biggest turbomolecular pump I have seen.
We have one as big as me when sitting down at work. :D
Yeah, I have no idea how I would heat a chamber that size. So running the pump for a long time seems to be the only option.
Haha, yes, there are far bigger ones :D
Why not make the 3D printed clamps wide enough so they bridge the whole space between the aluminium clamps? That would then add some (impact) protection to the window the whole way around, since they don’t really work as clamps properly anyway I guess (much less stiff and strong than the aluminium ones, so those take the load).
That's an interesting idea, I will try that out. And you are right, the 3D printed clamps are only for esthetics they do not clamp anything.
Good, Thx
2:30
Das Teil klingt so geil 🤩 wie alte sovietische Triebwerke 😅
In an electro trash dumpster at my university I have found a perfectly fine working GC-FID machine from Agilent or a small turbo [pump with controller xD It is a gold mine sometimes.
The stitch welds on the chamber surprise me. I guess it was epoxied together, and then a few stitch welds for strength?
The inside is completely welded. I don't think there was any epoxy involved.
Vacuum devices are usually welded from the inside if possible. Leaving un-welded seams on the inside will trap gases.
This window from alibaba reminds of the implosion of the titan submersible. Just dont take shortcuts like Stockton Rush.
black and silver looks fine dont change it
Will you not have out-gassing problems using Aluminium, and we always use gasket cord to make o-rings, as long as you cut it square and use fine emery paper to smooth it you won't have any problems
Yes, aluminium is worse than stainless but if you don't need to get into the UHV range, it's fine.
You can use it to recreate the Byford Dolphin Accident !
Are you worried about the localized heating from the LED cob on the 20 mm borosilicate glass?