Lab upgrade

Pictures du jour here.
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This is a good place to put pix of your lab or shop intended to produce the drool reaction. If topics get lengthy here, we may want to move most of the discussion to where it fits in the org scheme here (such as it is). Good place for announcements of things you just got working and so on. Respecting readers who may not have large bandwidth, try and keep the pictures to about one megapixel -- we have the BW and the storage here, no problems, but some readers may not.

Re: Lab upgrade

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Mar 17, 2011 9:56 pm

Nice looking rig! I guess you'll be testing and tuning for awhile before real results?

Looks like the sort of thing that's going to take awhile to get to base pressure -- all those warts and surface area. I'd guess you don't open this up real often once it's working? I know I keep my main system pumping at all times here unless I have to get in there to fix something, and even that takes a goodly while to get near its base pressure. Been pumping mine for about 12 hours since I had it open 1/2 hour this AM and it's still not there, but will probably be when I get up tomorrow. Only baked it for about 5-6 hours today, those heaters really eat the power, and when the sun goes down, so do things like that!
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Lab upgrade

Postby johnf » Fri Mar 18, 2011 12:15 am

Doug
the turbo that pumps the top bit is a Varian 550 so it can suck the whole thing inside out
when I left the turbo had been on for one hour and the pressure at the base of the accel section was 4 X 10-6 millibar. It has all weekend to get back to the normal 2 X 10 -8 millibar that it was at before the Accel tube went in
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Re: Lab upgrade

Postby johnf » Tue Apr 12, 2011 6:26 pm

It's been awhile but lots has happened.
To save having to have a 1:1 isolation transformer made with 200kV plus isolation (read very very expensive) I decided to make an isolated motor alternator system out of two Fisher and Pykel washing machine motors. These units are direct drive in these washing machines and are good to about a kilowatt, unfortunately they are three phase so the motor is driven in Delta and the alternator is wired Star. We are only using one phase of the three for terminal power. We need a power supply at the terminal of 400 watts max. The workshop here beat me to finishing, they got the two motors mounted up coupled with a meter of polycarbonate tubeing for the isolation long before I finished the motor drive electronics.

3phase1.jpg


And yes that is one of my turbo controller boards in there doing the business. Just bigger IGBTS in this case 15amp units @ 1200 volts. DC bus increased to 160volts, current trip set to 5 amps per phase

3phase2.jpg



The electronics was run for a few days with the alternator loaded to 300watts. the motor alternator setup looks like this

motor_alternator.jpg


Now to get this arrangement on to the terminal we needed a crane to hoist the parrot cage off the terminal for service so a cherry picker was squeezed into the lab

cherrypicker.jpg


so that a simple outrigger type crane could be installed

upintheair.jpg


I then had to complete the terminal wiring by putting in all the resistors across the accelleration tube segments

100kV acceltube.jpg


Now moving up from the acelleration section

terminalbot.jpg


Heres a couple more pics working our way up the terminal this next one shows the ionsource and motorised leak valve

terminalmid.jpg


The next photo shows the electronics at the top of the terminal. Constant current supply for thr ionsource electromagnet, Glassman 0-5kV 0-100mA supply for the ion source and the einzel supply and montitoring electronics that is interfaced to fibreoptics to the control rack below.

terminaltop.jpg


Now to use the new Crane to lift and place the parrotcage on the terminal. Note that the bottom section of the cage is covered in 0.125"thick lead so we dont x-ray ourselves while operating

parrotcage.jpg


I'll see how all this looks before adding more
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Re: Lab upgrade

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Apr 13, 2011 8:08 am

John, it looks great! More! Drool! An overview/perspective picture if you can get it would be nice too. I've been thinking along the same lines for powering things that have to float way up there in voltage. My particular junk box has some really nice DC servos that used to direct-drive computer tape reels that look good for this purpose. PM, brush type motors, really efficient. Of course, there'd be some brush noise, but I think I could handle that fine. Perhaps not as much power as the rig you show, but a couple hundred watts DC should be easy at 50v or thereabouts, with relatively low rpm/high torque for reduced vibration. One of those things I've been collecting parts for and thinking about, as the need will surely arise when I finally finish that 180kv supply.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Lab upgrade

Postby johnf » Wed Apr 13, 2011 10:26 pm

Doug
By an overview perspective I take it you are refering to the motor alternator setup??

OK the Washing machine motors are from the top loader Fisher and Pykel smart drive type.
They use a direct drive permanent magnet motor to drive the agitator so in wash it goes one about a turn and a half before reversing direction. When in spin its winds up in one direction only to about a 1000rpm. The bowl is coupled by a sort of torque convertor so in spin the bowl spins as fast as the agitator. Neat motors about 14 poles.
Because they are permanent magnet they also make good alternators. Normally the motor is wired 3 phase Star to suit a DC bus voltage of rectified 230 volts ie 300 odd volts on the DC bus. As you have access to the motor windings its easy to disconnect the star connection and bring out all 6 wires so you can wire it anyway you like.
These washers are sold in big numbers in the USA not sure of the brand name --could be Whirlpool. They last about 8 years before the shaft seal lets water into the two shaft ball races which fail in short order after the greas is washed out so there should be dozens of these at the local scrap yard or appliance repair outfit.
lots of info here http://www.ecoinnovation.co.nz/ they also have an outlet in the USA
This is where I bought the two motors from for this project NZ$500
I'll also post the above address under alternative energy
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Re: Lab upgrade

Postby Joe Jarski » Wed Apr 13, 2011 10:51 pm

John, that's some really nice work that you're doing! Thanks for all the pictures and descriptions.
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Re: Lab upgrade

Postby johnf » Mon Apr 18, 2011 1:17 am

OK

Last Friday I did a whole pile of voltage stress runs on the new system got to 85kV (thats all the Glassman is rated to)with no corona loss and no arc overs so conditioning got a tick

Today Andreas was back from Brazil (Ion beam Conference) and we took it for a test run with a CO beam @ 85 kV the motor - Alternator worked beautifully and a steady beam of 23uA of CO on target was played with for an hour or so.
X-rays are present in bundles but the lead skirt is working well --need to put a piece of lead inside the magnet to stop giving ourselves a suntan.
Last thig I did was to control crash the turbo and remove the viewport from under the magnet that looks up at the ion source and replace it with solid SS to mitigate the flood of x-rays coming out of the glass. As it is possible to hit the viewport with a 3mA beam if the magnet is not powered, we decided that the glass would not take this sort of power for long.
I will wrap the SS conflat with lead in the morning and undoubtably we will do some trial implantations

I suppose that my next job will be to build a 200kV supply to replace the Glassman
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Re: Lab upgrade

Postby Doug Coulter » Mon Apr 18, 2011 8:56 am

Yes, thanks for this. Even though most of us probably won't build something like it the information is good for us all to learn from for the things we do attempt.

I'll second the X ray issue. I accidentally picked up a few millirems the other day on that new fusor I put together with no shielding (yet). Thought about it part way through an initial test, got out the dosimeter and gheeeezzz -- that was pretty nasty coming out of the window, even at much lower voltage (35kv or so, but lots of current, so plenty of flux).

I'd guess that your beam at full power would shatter the glass you've got in there pretty quick, sounds like a good move to remove it. I'm thinking periscopes here, and putting the glass out of line, using a mirror here and there to let me still observe things, while keeping the glass and myself out of harm's way.

Great to hear that motor-generator is working out, partly because I plan to make one too :) . I love it when I can quick-adapt something like you did with your turbo controller to another application. Nowadays I am usually thinking about that a little bit whenever I do a design, because it's so cool when it works out. I've gotten a lot of uses out of that H bridge driver I'd not thought of when I was making them just for HV power supplies, for example.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Lab upgrade

Postby johnf » Wed Apr 20, 2011 5:14 am

Todays update

Yesterday we had a massive 85kV flashover and the motor generator system took the hit, probably from to much gas in the accel tube
blew the IR chip and nothing else I now have added 3 transils from each phase to earth-- PKE400 's to clip transients getting at the phase monitoring inputs that the IR chip needs to work. I also put clamp on ferrites on the motor feed cable to slow the wavefront from a flashover.

Today we took it for another test run and after finally throttling the gas back got a 225uA CO beam on target @ 75kV --thats 15 watts per sq cm and yes the silicon target was glowing red hot.
Thats one hell of a lot of atoms impinging, system stable it ran like that for two hours (we need our tea breaks).

Andreas very pleased, after Easter we need to establish a copper beam of these proportions for a client --this will be fun!!

magnet was at 0.6 T for the CO it will have to nearly double for the Cu beam
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Re: Lab upgrade

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Apr 20, 2011 11:50 am

So, how do you figure that got across the motor-generator? Capacitive coupling? I know I've had that one happen here, and have prevented future occurences of it with a separately grounded shield between things to absorb most of the charge involved. It doesn't have to be perfect ground to help a heck of a lot. Seems an arc can make some really fast rise (or fall) times, and if there's some amount of unsheilded conductor involved, it not only radiates as radio waves, but also simply cap couples into everything around it - a few pf's is enough to make real trouble when you're talking about the volts/uS involved in one.

Yeah, 220 uA is a heck of a lot of atoms/second especially if they're single charged. I did a little math on that here for those who didn't see that. The condensed version is:
1 amp is .629 e19 unit charges per second. So one microamp is .629 e13 charges per second.


And some power at 85kV== 18.7 watts. Those who don't do vacuum won't understand that 20w or so focused on a point is going to get that spot quite hot indeed. We get so used to how well air carries away heat we forget about that one. But 20w into the filament of a vacuum light bulb gives you some idea of what would happen to a substrate getting hit with that much in a small area.

The copper sounds like fun, I'd love to hear more about that when you can tell us about it. Implanting copper, hmmm, why would you want to do that? I always have a few guesses...
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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