Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Diagnosing glovebox pump

Today Alan helped me use a pressure gauge to diagnose the glovebox pump. We concluded that our pump is very bad. Our pump only pumps down to 80 Torr whereas the KGB pump goes down to 20-30 mTorr. We didn't find any major leaks in the glovebox system itself.

Test details:
Our pump connected to gauge, with outlet filter: 100 Torr
Our pump connected to gauge w/o outlet filter: 80 Torr
--> we might need new outlet filter
KGB pump connected to gauge: 20-30 mTorr
KGB pump connected to gauge + glovebox: 20-30 mTorr
KGB pump connected to gauge + glovebox + mini-antechamber: 20-30 mTorr

Opening valve slowly (pressure not exceeding 100 Torr), it took about 4 minutes to pump down the mini-antechamber.

Tomorrow I will set up the KGP pump semi-permanently so that we can use it while we have our pump repaired.

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