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A vacuum pump is a type of pump device that draws gas from a sealed volume in order to leave behind a partial vacuum. The first vacuum pump was invented in 1650 by Otto von Guericke, and was preceded by the suction pump, which dates to antiquity.
By the 17th century, water pump designs had improved to the point that they produced measurable vacuums, but this was not immediately understood. What was known was that suction pumps could not pull water beyond a certain height: 18 Florentine yards according to a measurement taken around 1635, or about . This limit was a concern in irrigation projects, mine drainage, and decorative water fountains planned by the Duke of Tuscany, so the duke commissioned Galileo Galilei to investigate the problem. Galileo suggested, incorrectly, in his Two New Sciences (1638) that the column of a water pump will break of its own weight when the water has been lifted to 34 feet. Other scientists took up the challenge, including Gasparo Berti, who replicated it by building the first water barometer in Rome in 1639. Berti's barometer produced a vacuum above the water column, but he could not explain it. A breakthrough was made by Galileo's student Evangelista Torricelli in 1643. Building upon Galileo's notes, he built the first mercury barometer and wrote a convincing argument that the space at the top was a vacuum. The height of the column was then limited to the maximum weight that atmospheric pressure could support; this is the limiting height of a suction pump.
In 1650, Otto von Guericke invented the first vacuum pump. Four years later, he conducted his famous Magdeburg hemispheres experiment, showing that teams of horses could not separate two hemispheres from which the air had been evacuated. Robert Boyle improved Guericke's design and conducted experiments on the properties of vacuum. Robert Hooke also helped Boyle produce an air pump that helped to produce the vacuum.
By 1709, Francis Hauksbee improved on the design further with his two-cylinder pump, where two pistons worked via a rack-and-pinion design that reportedly "gave a vacuum within about one inch of mercury of perfect." This design remained popular and only slightly changed until well into the nineteenth century.
Positive displacement pumps are the most effective for low vacuums. Momentum transfer pumps, in conjunction with one or two positive displacement pumps, are the most common configuration used to achieve high vacuums. In this configuration the positive displacement pump serves two purposes. First it obtains a rough vacuum in the vessel being evacuated before the momentum transfer pump can be used to obtain the high vacuum, as momentum transfer pumps cannot start pumping at atmospheric pressures. Second the positive displacement pump backs up the momentum transfer pump by evacuating to low vacuum the accumulation of displaced molecules in the high vacuum pump. Entrapment pumps can be added to reach ultrahigh vacuums, but they require periodic regeneration of the surfaces that trap air molecules or ions. Due to this requirement their available operational time can be unacceptably short in low and high vacuums, thus limiting their use to ultrahigh vacuums. Pumps also differ in details like manufacturing tolerances, sealing material, pressure, flow, admission or no admission of oil vapor, service intervals, reliability, tolerance to dust, tolerance to chemicals, tolerance to liquids and vibration.
More sophisticated systems are used for most industrial applications, but the basic principle of cyclic volume removal is the same:
The base pressure of a rubber- and plastic-sealed piston pump system is typically 1 to 50 kPa, while a scroll pump might reach 10 Pa (when new) and a rotary vane oil pump with a clean and empty metallic chamber can easily achieve 0.1 Pa.
A positive displacement vacuum pump moves the same volume of gas with each cycle, so its pumping speed is constant unless it is overcome by backstreaming.
Molecular pumps sweep out a larger area than mechanical pumps, and do so more frequently, making them capable of much higher pumping speeds. They do this at the expense of the seal between the vacuum and their exhaust. Since there is no seal, a small pressure at the exhaust can easily cause backstreaming through the pump; this is called stall. In high vacuum, however, pressure gradients have little effect on fluid flows, and molecular pumps can attain their full potential.
The two main types of molecular pumps are the diffusion pump and the turbomolecular pump. Both types of pumps blow out gas molecules that diffuse into the pump by imparting momentum to the gas molecules. Diffusion pumps blow out gas molecules with jets of an oil or mercury vapor, while turbomolecular pumps use high speed fans to push the gas. Both of these pumps will stall and fail to pump if exhausted directly to atmospheric pressure, so they must be exhausted to a lower grade vacuum created by a mechanical pump, in this case called a backing pump.
As with positive displacement pumps, the base pressure will be reached when leakage, outgassing, and backstreaming equal the pump speed, but now minimizing leakage and outgassing to a level comparable to backstreaming becomes much more difficult.
This type of pump suffers from high power consumption(~1 kW) compared to turbomolecular pump (<100W) at low pressure since most power is consumed to back atmospheric pressure. This can be reduced by nearly 10 times by backing with a small pump.
Throughput refers to the pumping speed multiplied by the gas pressure at the inlet, and is measured in units of pressure·volume/unit time. At a constant temperature, throughput is proportional to the number of molecules being pumped per unit time, and therefore to the mass flow rate of the pump. When discussing a leak in the system or backstreaming through the pump, throughput refers to the volume leak rate multiplied by the pressure at the vacuum side of the leak, so the leak throughput can be compared to the pump throughput.
Positive displacement and momentum transfer pumps have a constant volume flow rate (pumping speed), but as the chamber's pressure drops, this volume contains less and less mass. So although the pumping speed remains constant, the throughput and mass flow rate drop exponentially. Meanwhile, the leakage, evaporation, sublimation and backstreaming rates continue to produce a constant throughput into the system.
Achieving high vacuum is difficult because all of the materials exposed to the vacuum must be carefully evaluated for their outgassing and vapor pressure properties. For example, oils, greases, and rubber or plastic used as seals for the vacuum chamber must not Boiling point off when exposed to the vacuum, or the gases they produce would prevent the creation of the desired degree of vacuum. Often, all of the surfaces exposed to the vacuum must be baked at high temperature to drive off adsorption gases.
Outgassing can also be reduced simply by desiccation prior to vacuum pumping. High-vacuum systems generally require metal chambers with metal gasket seals such as Klein flanges or ISO flanges, rather than the rubber gaskets more common in low vacuum chamber seals. The system must be clean and free of organic matter to minimize outgassing. All materials, solid or liquid, have a small vapour pressure, and their outgassing becomes important when the vacuum pressure falls below this vapour pressure. As a result, many materials that work well in low vacuums, such as epoxy, will become a source of outgassing at higher vacuums. With these standard precautions, vacuums of 1 mPa are easily achieved with an assortment of molecular pumps. With careful design and operation, 1 μPa is possible.
Several types of pumps may be used in sequence or in parallel. In a typical pumpdown sequence, a positive displacement pump would be used to remove most of the gas from a chamber, starting from atmosphere (760 Torr, 101 kPa) to 25 Torr (3 kPa). Then a sorption pump would be used to bring the pressure down to 10−4 Torr (10 mPa). A cryopump or turbomolecular pump would be used to bring the pressure further down to 10−8 Torr (1 μPa). An additional ion pump can be started below 10−6 Torr to remove gases which are not adequately handled by a cryopump or turbo pump, such as helium or hydrogen.
Ultra-high vacuum generally requires custom-built equipment, strict operational procedures, and a fair amount of trial-and-error. Ultra-high vacuum systems are usually made of stainless steel with metal-gasketed . The system is usually baked, preferably under vacuum, to temporarily raise the vapour pressure of all outgassing materials in the system and boil them off. If necessary, this outgassing of the system can also be performed at room temperature, but this takes much more time. Once the bulk of the outgassing materials are boiled off and evacuated, the system may be cooled to lower vapour pressures to minimize residual outgassing during actual operation. Some systems are cooled well below room temperature by liquid nitrogen to shut down residual outgassing and simultaneously cryopump the system.
In ultra-high vacuum systems, some very odd leakage paths and outgassing sources must be considered. The water absorption of aluminium and palladium becomes an unacceptable source of outgassing, and even the absorptivity of hard metals such as stainless steel or titanium must be considered. Some oils and greases will boil off in extreme vacuums. The porosity of the metallic vacuum chamber walls may have to be considered, and the grain direction of the metallic flanges should be parallel to the flange face.
The impact of molecular size must be considered. Smaller molecules can leak in more easily and are more easily absorbed by certain materials, and molecular pumps are less effective at pumping gases with lower molecular weights. A system may be able to evacuate nitrogen (the main component of air) to the desired vacuum, but the chamber could still be full of residual atmospheric hydrogen and helium. Vessels lined with a highly gas-permeable material such as palladium (which is a high-capacity hydrogen sponge) create special outgassing problems.
In the field of oil regeneration and re-refining, vacuum pumps create a low vacuum for oil dehydration and a high vacuum for oil purification.
A vacuum may be used to power, or provide assistance to mechanical devices. In hybrid and diesel engine , a pump fitted on the engine (usually on the camshaft) is used to produce a vacuum. In , instead, the vacuum is typically obtained as a side-effect of the operation of the engine and the flow restriction created by the throttle plate but may be also supplemented by an Electricity vacuum pump to boost braking assistance or improve fuel consumption. This vacuum may then be used to power the following motor vehicle components: vacuum servo booster for the hydraulic brakes, motors that move zone damper in the ventilation system, throttle driver in the cruise control servomechanism, door locks or trunk releases.
In an aircraft, the vacuum source is often used to power in the various flight instruments. To prevent the complete loss of instrumentation in the event of an Electricity failure, the instrument panel is deliberately designed with certain instruments powered by electricity and other instruments powered by the vacuum source.
Depending on the application, some vacuum pumps may either be Electricity (using electric current) or Pneumatics (using Pressurized air), or powered and Actuator.
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