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TVAC Shrouds and Other News

5/5/2020

 

​Shroud Upgrade for TVAC#2

As our customers will know, our thermal vacuum chambers are very flexible in terms of temperature ranges, thermal exchange plates and instrumentation they can be fitted with. We design and build our chamber systems ourselves so we are able to break them down and re-configure or upgrade them when required.

Since we commissioned TVAC#2  in 2018 we have been planning to install a custom shroud to improve thermal performance for larger items under test (both monitored vacuum bakeout and thermal vacuum cycling tests). Due to demand for the vacuum chamber we have had to delay this work until now. Final fitting and testing will take place over the next few weeks.
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TVAC#2 shroud with fluid lines for cooling and IR fixtures for heating
solar simulator

Unisim Solar Simulator Builds

We are currently underway with several close match solar simulator builds. It's always great when we are contacted by new customers who want to buy our solar simulators, but we are also very appreciative of our repeat customers and we are extremely pleased to be building systems for both situations right now.

Our standard range of Unisim solar simulators can be built with varying number of spectral zones and beam configurations. Our smaller Unisim Compact solar simulator can also be built with various aspects included/excluded to the customer's specification. Infrared boost zones, SMU and AM1.5 filter units can all be easily fitted at a later date if required.

December Update and News

2/12/2019

 

New TVAC Chamber TVAC#3 for 2020

We are continually looking at where we can improve our equipment and test services as well as invest in additional equipment. In 2018 our second TVAC chamber TVAC#2 came online and toward the end of that year  we purchased and and set up our in-house FTIR facility for molecular contamination monitoring (in accordnace with ECSS-Q-ST-70-05C). Throughout 2019 our existing TVAC chambers have been in high demand so we are pleased to announce that we will be commissioning our third TVAC chamber (surprisingly called TVAC#3) in early 2020. The chamber is identical to TVAC#2 in terms of size and will be configured with the same oil-less pumping system and thermal interface plate. For additional details and announcements on this system follow our news section or contact us to sign up to our newsletter.
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Offgassing Testing

We have seen an increase in requests for offgassing testing throughout this year (not to be conflated with our outgassing test services). We have developed a method which is a variation of the “Gas Accumulation Method” (J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 20(5) Sept/Oct 2002 p 1667). This test can only currently be conducted in our TVAC#1 chamber as the experiment requires a gate valve.
 
If you require offgassing testing for your sample and are interested in our services, please feel free to contact us for a discussion.

Christmas Closing Dates

This year has gone by incredibly quickly and we'd like to thank all of our customers and welcome those who have found us in 2019. We look forward to working with you in 2020 and beyond.
 
Our Christmas closing period will be from:
  • Last day 2019 - Friday 20th December
  • First day 2020 - Thursday 2nd January

We would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a very happy and productive 2020.
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TVAC#1, Outgassing Charges and Other News

1/4/2019

 
We have had a very busy start to the year which is why ours news updates have been so few in the past 3 months. We are still very busy with test work (thermal vacuum bakeouts and thermal vacuum cycling) as well as building a large piece of bespoke test equipment for a new customer.

TVAC#1 has been down for maintenance longer than scheduled, primarily due to the sudden influx of test work at the beginning of the year which demanded our attention. We are now just about to begin pumping down and leak testing TVAC#1 and checking the new T/C's and heaters we have fitted. We will also be fitting a PID control unit for the IR heaters to this vacuum chamber so that it has the same capability as TVAC#2.

We have also had delays in obtaining materials required for commissioning our FTIR system for contamination monitoring during bakeouts. We now have everything in stock and will be working to get this established as soon as possible. Our first use of this will be to run blank bakes on our TVAC#1 vacuum test chamber to get it back in service. We will then be able to offer in-house FTIR analysis for contamination control for both our thermal vacuum bakeout facilities.

Finally, we have not reviewed our Outgassing (ECSS-Q-ST-70-02) facility charges for over 4 years and as such a price for this service is planned for later in the year. We will be announcing any changes via our news blog and our newsletter.

TVAC#2 Chamber Online

13/7/2018

 
We are pleased to announce that our second thermal vacuum test chamber, TVAC#2, is now fully tested and online. In the first week already we have managed to accommodate a last-minute test requirement for a customer and we are now pre-baking the chamber in preparation for a series of flight hardware bakeouts.

The chamber features:
  • PID controlled thermal plate with resistive heating and liquid channels for cooling either by chiller circulator or LN2
  • Cold trap with removable fascia for lab analysis if required
  • QCM for bakeout monitoring 
  • Residual Gas Analyser (Hiden Analytical)
  • Standard 16 T-type thermocouple channels (more channels, or different TC types can be added with notice)
  • Temperature, pressure, QCM and RGA all logged digitally
  • Door seal and chamber wall fluid cooling lines for high temperature tests (>300°C)
  • Scroll pump and magnetically levitated turbo molecular pump meaning a completely oil-free pumping system

We also have a multi-part shroud under manufacture which will use the same resistive heating and fluid line design as the thermal plate. This is scheduled to be installed towards the end of the year when we tend to have more downtime for our test house facilities.
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Update: Thermal Vacuum Chamber - TVAC#2

4/4/2018

 
The installation of our new thermal vacuum chamber is slightly behind schedule but we are still on track to start testing the vacuum and thermal control system at the end of this month. New custom flanges for the old gate valve port are in the final stages of fabrication and finishing, the scroll and mag-lev turbo molecular pumps are installed and the control systems for the thermal plate are starting testing the end of this week.

TVAC#2 has water cooled door seals and chamber walls which means it will be capable of higher maximum temperatures than TVAC#1. We are also installing a thermal plate design we developed for a customer several years ago to achieve a very uniform temperature when using LN2 for cold temperatures and dwells.

There are also further re-designs from the thermal system of TVAC#1 which will be tested in TVAC#2 and will be used to upgrade TVAC#1 in the future.

Follow this blog for future updates or keep an eye on our test house page for when TVAC#2 is fully operational.
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