Small Custom Thermal Vacuum Chambers

By Nanovac AB

SMALL CUSTOM chambers are ideally suited for testing small(er) space hardware. We deliver quite a few smaller custom chambers every year. The driving point is usually a specific product that needs to undergo thermal vacu-um tests, where the physical size of the test component is quite small. The benefits of a smaller chamber is that typically the overall cost is greatly reduced. You can operate with smaller pumps, and depend-ing on the thermal range, usually smaller TCUs (thermal control units) can be used. But, although these systems may be smaller, they still adhere to the strict quality requirements of all our system builds. Also, during the development and design of concept we re-main in close dialogue with our end-users to make sure we capture and consider all of their operational requirements and concerns. As with our larger chambers, we always recom-mend equipping the chambers with as many ports as viable, to ensure you have room to grow, even in your small thermal vacuum test chamber. These systems are com-monly equipped with our smaller GUI ( g r a p h i c a l user inter-faces) that are touch-s c r e e n based. The GUI provides the operator with an easy to use interface and also the c a p a b i l i t y to program simple cycle recipes. Just as with our larger chambers the small cham-bers utilize the same award winning control architecture that allows advanced re-mote connection ca-pabilities (both for us to provide remote support, but also for your team to remotely access the system). The variations and configurations available is virtually limitless. We have a range of standard format chambers that we can offer, but, in most cases we end up doing a custom solution based on the ”templates” that we have available. These chambers can delivered naked (no chamber furniture fitted) or fully configured with thermal test plate and thermal shrouds. Depending on the thermal requirements, the chambers can operate with recirculating TCUs or use liquid nitrogen (LN 2) to achieve lower operating temperatures. The small test chambers are overwhelmingly delivered with turbo molecular high vacuum pumps rather than cryogenic high vacuum pumps. The chambers can be delivered with isolation valves or without, all depending on the budgetary requirements. All our turn-key solutions are delivered with all the necessary vacuum pumps, valves and gauges to allow for automatic operation. The smaller systems usually does not require any field person-nel to install, but are easily installed by the end-user in their own laboratory. The systems typically need only electricity, compressed air to operate (may need cooling water depending on the final configuration). All our systems have built in self diagnos-tics which activates once the chamber is powered on. The diagnostics look at certain key parameters and their operational values, and if they are outside the given operational window, the system will issue a warning (or alarm) to alert the operator on a potential issue.