Bespoke Vacuum Carts Offer Mobility

Leading vacuum technology company Edwards has designed and delivered 14 bespoke vacuum carts to the UK’s national synchrotron, Diamond Light Source, on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Oxfordshire, which is currently the world’s brightest medium-energy source. The carts provide mobile high vacuum pumping stations for the synchrotron’s beamlines to help create the optimum vacuum conditions required by researchers.

They also have the capability to be fitted with residual gas analysers (RGAs) to analyse the integrity of the vacuum in the beamlines. The easy-to-use, mobile, ‘plug and go’ Edwards unit means researchers can avoid the cost and space requirements of numerous fixed mechanical pumping stations on each beamline. Evacuating and venting the beamlines using the carts helps to ensure the cleanliness of the systems and so helps in
achieving vacuum pressures less than 5 x 10-9 mbar in the beamlines. Pressures in the beamlines need to be kept in the ultra-high vacuum (UHV) region to ensure contamination does not migrate into the accelerator sections, to prevent contamination of xray optics and, in some beamlines, to maintain cleanliness of the samples under investigation.

Each Edwards cart comprises an EXTTM225H compound molecular vacuum pump, an XDSTM10 dry scroll pump used as the backing pump, and a combination of active Pirani vacuum, active inverted magnetron and active wide range gauges. These are enclosed in a cart designed to meet the specific size and orientation requirements of the Diamond beamlines and which can be wheeled around the beamlines or to other locations as required. Edwards has also supplied conversion kits to enable vacuum carts it had previously supplied to Diamond to be upgraded to the new design.