Although this doesn't have much to do with the building of amplifiers,
it does shed insight into some of the complications of making good tubes
and how the technology there has impacted other industries.
General Electric was one of the first to recognize that vacuum tubes
(their Pliotrons and Kenotrons) required better vacuum than the Audion's
had that were made by DeForest companies. So naturally, a lot of
development came from GE and also benefited their Xray tubes.
K8RI's experience (below) is helpful here. I am in RF engineering and
only observe vacuum experts doing their stuff from the sidelines. We
work hand in hand, of course, in not applying RF power until vacuum is
sufficient. I know of several instances at particle accelerator
laboratories where oil contamination from diffusion pumps created a
costly mess. I didn't think we have them for pumping between 10^-1 and
-6. The big roughing pumps are indeed rotary. We use cryo pumps and ion
pumps, maybe the cryos are for in-between? I know they have to be
regenerated regularly.
Our accelerator cavities need to be in the low 10^-7 Torr or we get many
discharges from the extreme RF voltages there. Electron accelerators
need much better vacuum. I believe that big tubes must be better than -6
to minimize damaging flashovers during conditioning.
73
John
K5PRO
From: "Roger (K8RI)" <k8ri@rogerhalstead.com>
Roughing pumps do not normally get anywhere near the vacuum needed to
start an Ion pump. We used a roughing pump to get to 10^-1 Torr, then
a diffusion pump to make 10^-6, (-7.with a liquid N2 cold trap) At that
point we'd start the ion pump. Once it was working, we'd valve off the
diffusion pump inlet as the ion pump would not work in parallel with the
diffusion pump. It would pull oil, or mercury fumes out of the diffusion
pump.
We used ion pumps on a mass spectrometer. It created a beam of ions
containing the material to be analyzed. This beam passed between two
curved and charged plates inside a powerful electromagnet. IIRC the
poles were about 10" in diameter with the magnet weighing around a ton.
However the last time I worked on that was "maybe in or around 1980.
An ion pump is basically a big diode that collects ions on the
surface, or getter. They have no exhaust. Starting one at the typical
10^-1 Torr of a roughing pump would quickly contaminate the ion pump.
Penning tubes will light up with plasma around 1 X 10^-1. The ionization
will go out around 1 X 10^-2. The ion pump would need much better than
that to start.
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