Vacuum can never be completely appreciated unless it is fully known, and I've always noticed that those who work in the vacuum industry have a genuine commitment to their passion in vacuum science and a willingness to apply it to a range of scenarios.
Dr Graham Rogers unpacks the critical role that vacuum technology plays in the production, storage and transport of COVID-19 vaccines.
In our blog: 'Introduction to Vacuum Coating Technology', we introduced you to various PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) methods and how products are typically coated using vacuum technology. Then, in our second blog 'Introduction to Vacuum Coating by Thermal Evaporation', we focused on coating techniques and applications using thermal evaporators and e-beam-evaporators. This blog, will introduce you to sputter technologies, typical uses, and how vacuum technology is applied to the process.
Fore vacuum pumps are defined as those which exhaust to atmospheric pressure. They are also required to support secondary pumps or to attain the initial conditions for their operation. There are two types of fore vacuum pumps:
In our previous blog post, Introduction to Vacuum Coating Technology, we shared various PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) methods and showed typical products being coated using vacuum technologies. Thin films can be adhered to metal, glass, plastics, ceramics, or paper. In this blog post we will focus on Thermal Evaporation techniques.
This blog is based on the article in Applied Science and Convergence Technology 26 (5): 95-109 (2017) R Grinham and A Chew.
There are four main ways you can reduce outgassing in your vacuum system. These are: cleaning and handling, surface treatment, passivation, and purging and backfilling. In this blog, we will take a closer look at each of these methods.
This blog is based on the article in Applied Science and Convergence Technology 26 (5): 95-109 (2017) R Grinham and A Chew.
There are several contributions to the gas load of a system. At pressures below ~0.1 mbar, the most dominant is often ‘outgassing’. Outgassing is the result of desorption of previously adsorbed molecules, bulk diffusion, permeation and vapourisation. Adsorption occurs via two main processes, physisorption and chemisorption, and can be described using five (or six) classifying isotherms.
According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, at least one-third of food is lost or wasted between harvest and household. In North-America and Europe, this means more than 100 kg of food lost per capita – summing up to 1.3 billion tons annually worldwide! A reduction to this huge mass of food produced in vain would contribute greatly to reducing the greenhouse effect.
Screw pumps belong to the family of dry compressing gas transfer pumps. (Learn more about the origins of dry pumps here) They are positive-displacement pumps that use two screw shaped intermeshing rotors to move gas along the screw’s axis. They are frequently used in industrial vacuum applications, often in combination with roots blowers and as oil-free roughing pumps in high and ultrahigh vacuum systems.
