Turbomolecular Madness – A Nerve-Wracking Experience

I'm hearing a noise that I don't like in my last video I showed you this absolute Beast of a pump even though it looks like a small jet engine it is actually a vacuum pump this is a turbomolecular pump in this case it is a Fifer tph 2101 and these pumps are used to create a high vacuum they are basically the pump you use when a normal rotary vein pump like this one here does not suffice and you want to get to lower pressures in my last video I asked you guys if you wouldd like me to Mount this pump on my vacuum chamber which would mean that I basically have a pump the same size as my chamber and most of you said yes the problem is that I don't have a flench to mount this pump to my chamber I need an adapter from the DN 320 Flinch right here to the DN 250 flench on the pump so I asked Vis vakuum which is the same company that built this absolutely beautiful full chamber if they could help me and they actually said yes um I still have no idea why they let me do this stuff and the brilliant thing is they said I could weld the flanch myself since I had no prior experience in welding I was allowed to practice on a few pieces of stainless steel first and not to bre but I must say for my first wels I'm quite pleased afterwards we took a DM 320 blind flange and using a beautiful lathe created a hole in this flange now it can be connected to a DN 250 ring using a short pipe section the initial Tech Wells were made by the owner of thisle vacuum to ensure everything was correctly aligned but then I got to weld the Flinch on the welding turntable the wealth certainly won't win a beauty contest but they are made by myself and made with love and the helium leak test showed no leaks at all I don't know how to thank this a vakum for their help they didn't even ask for a shout out or anything else so the only thing I can tell you is that if you ever need vacuum equipment this vacum is definitely the right partner you can find a link to their website in the video description so I would say let's Mount the pump on my chamber lifting this pump on top of my chamber is easier set than done since it weighs approximately 40 kg but I will do my best [Music] I actually thought about using both of my small vacuum pumps and use a t piece to connect them to this K40 flange right here but since I want to compare this pump with my small Turbo 50 I think it won't be fair to use two of them so I will just use this kf40 to kf-16 adapter okay the chamber is currently pumping down I'm monitoring the pressure using my DIY pressure gauge controller there will be an upcoming video about this as soon as I get the new PCB version manufactured um what I want to say is thank you to the person that made this python interface you are great I'm going to use it to record the pressure and and the pressure drops so we can compare the two uh pumps with each other here you can see the controller for the huge toal molecular pump I'm using my P rotary vein vacuum pump as a roughing pump and I have two vacuum gauges the BPG 42s and the PSG 500s at the bottom right there the PSG 500s won't be able to record pressures uh at a certain point so then I'm going to rely on the BPG if you are wondering why my vacuum chamber is in this corner here this allows me to mount it to my workbench and gives the whole setup a little bit more rigidity it's still not what you would consider uh completely safe but I think it's safe enough and I'm really interested to see how the pressure behaves once I turn this thing on I have to admit that I'm rarely that nervous when turning something on but here we go the pump is is currently doing a self check and then it will spin up okay it started spinning I'm hearing a noise that I don't like nope I'm not doing that uh at around 10% its maximum speed I monitored the speed using my multimeter it has an analog 0 to 10 volt output you heard it the pump makes noises you don't want to hear uh so I'm not spinning this up any further but I think I will try to mount the pump I did not disassemble fill in the oil I put into this pump into the other one I am basically doing an oil transfusion the oil is starn expensive and I only had enough oil for one pump which is why I have to transfer it to the other one okay I have installed the other pump I've not taken apart so if this also makes the same noises I know that I'm not uh guilty of destroying the other pump I'm just keeping my hand uh on the pump here to feel if any vibrations occur 6% this pump approximately takes 11 minutes to get up to its full speed 7 [Music] 9 [Music] and we do hear the same noises and you can feel quite uh the vibration coming from the pump in my opinion it shouldn't sound that way interestingly it happens at 10% the of the speed I'm wondering if it's a area of resonance for this pump so maybe if we exceed this range uh it will stop [Applause] [Music] [Applause] but we're at 12% total speed and the noise actually [Applause] stopped but man I don't think it's supposed to make that noise I feels so freaking wrong Jesus if it wouldn't be standing right next to it I would just go away and let it spin up um but that way I don't I no no interestingly it seems to be caused by the acceleration of the pump because as soon as I turn off the power supply the noise and the vibration stop so it's not the road spinning that causes this I think because right now the water is spinning at 133% of its maximum speed and it's not making any vibrations interesting I just uh turned the power supply back on and the pump is accelerating but doesn't make any noise we're at 16% 177% it basically feels like it's not running at all 20% 25 I really don't get it and I'm wondering if my other pump behaves the same way because this thing I could balance a coin on it and it's at 30% 40% [Music] 50% I should wear a um pulse measuring device 60% and right now the pump again doesn't make any vibrations at all the pressure is dropping we are at 80% [Applause] 96% and just to prove to you that there are no vibrations at all uh I Balan this coin here on the pump which is Prett pretty awesome I think considering that the pump is spinning at 30,000 RPM nice we are currently at a pressure of 2.6 * 10 power of - 6 MB this time because I was so worried about the vibrations I didn't record a pressure curve so I will now stop the pump let it uh slow down then start it again to record the extral pressure curve okay the pump stand still right now and the pressure is at around 0.2 M bars let's turn this pump on and see how quickly it evacuates my chamber and let's see if the pump again makes those terrifying noises yeah you can again feel some vibration building up I think you just have to push past this um speed where some kind of weird resonance is happening so in under 10 minutes basically or approximately 10 minutes 11 minutes the speed it took the pump to get to its full speed we reached a pressure of 2.6 time * 10 to the power of - 6 Ms which is awesome I think uh yeah now that I know that the pump I didn't mess with makes the same noises at around 10% speed I'm trying to restore my honor and that's why I reinstalled the pump I disassembled and reassembled again you can see how stressed I am by my sweat on the pump here everything looks good the pump is running fine so I'm very relieved that I didn't mess it up uh when working on it um we are currently at the pressure of 4 * 10 to the power of- 6 M and yeah looks great we are at a 100% speed uh I'm very satisfied and just to demonstrate to you that I didn't mess up the balance or anything you can see that well you can't see but the rotor is spinning I mean you can hear it and you can see the voltage at 10 volts which means 100% speed and still I can balance and a 5cent coin uh on its Edge on this pump which is just great I have now tested both pumps several times this is again the one I didn't mess with so I did the starter procedure and shutdown procedure several times with each pump and they all the time make this noise at around 10% full speed and at this point I don't think it is caused by resonance the sound at 50% full speed I think is caused by resonance and it also Fades out much slower but but yeah if you know what this could be let me know in the comments right now the pump is at uh 100% speed and you wouldn't even know that it is running if you wouldn't feel that the pump is a little bit warm to compare both pumps I now going to evacuate the chamber with my small turbovac 50 you can see the sheer size difference between this pump and the large Piper pump now for the results if you compare the pump on curve you might think that the small turbak 50 outperforms the large pump here that actually just looks that way because the small turbovac 50 because it is smaller spins up way faster if we look at both of these Curves in a logarithmic scale you can see that as soon as the large pump spins up it outperforms the small one by a long shot in case you're wondering what those spikes in the pressure curve are I think the first Spike which appears in both curves is the moment when the BPG 4002 switches from its pirani measuring mode into the ionization gauge mode I've noticed this artifact several times and the ones lower down the curve I think are just measuring errors or some kind of artifact it might be possible that I have a leak in my chamber which would be way more noticeable with a small pump than with the large one and yeah it was a very fun video would you consider it safe what I did here depends um but it was very fun uh exciting regarding the vibrations and the sounds caused by the these pumps I'm absolutely certain it's not the pump's fault on the one hand they are not meant to be boled to a flimsy stand like this one they're meant to be fixed to a chamber bought to the ground and yeah my stand for the vacuum chamber is basically a toy compared to what this pump is meant for and I'm pretty certain that this could be a reason that maybe vibrations can build up on the other hand these pumps have not been maintained for over 12 years and I think it's amazing that they even work as good as they do considering the tolerances and the speed at which they turn it's just a miracle of Engineering in my opinion and I'm absolutely satisfied with how these pumps performed my next video with the vacuum chamber will probably be physical vapor deposition using thermal evaporation due to the support of my patreons I was able to buy a varc which I needed to get my thermal evaporation system up and running so thank you very much I'm really grateful for your support and if you want to become a patreon there is a link in the video description in case you're interested I really HED you like today's video and other than that thank you a lot for watching

Channel: Advanced Tinkering

Views: 65,124

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Id: KHjPHBVhygY

Length: 15min 25sec (925 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 19 2023