Streicher develops and manufactures vacuum equipment for a number of areas, it won a prestigious order in the middle of last year. “The space industry is one of the areas for which our vacuum devices are intended,” said Jiří Lopata, executive director of the engineering division of the aforementioned company.
Emil Černý, head of the construction department, added: “Although we usually manufacture the chambers as welded assemblies, this one was created due to the required small size by machining from a single piece of stainless steel.”
Photo: Streicher Pilsen
A vacuum chamber for simulating the space environment
At the bottom is the so-called breadboard. “It is made of aluminum and connected for cooling. Thanks to the system of channels through which it is woven, it uses liquid nitrogen to cool the chamber down to minus one hundred and eighty degrees,” explained Černý.
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“At the same time, we integrated electric heaters capable of baking the chamber to a temperature of two hundred degrees,” he added.
They ensure a homogeneous temperature inside the device with stainless steel radiation shields – they prevent the chamber from absorbing heat and dissipating it outside.
Cryogenic trap
An important part of the apparatus is a vacuum grommet – the so-called coldfinger – developed especially for this project. It is a highly subcooled component whose task will be to trap free particles that evaporate from the tested part during its baking.
“This cryogenic trap will thus protect the walls of the chamber and the vacuum pumping system from unwanted free particles. It will provide the same protection to the technologies with which ESA will install the chamber,” pointed out Šárka Stará from the company’s marketing.
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The European Space Agency will equip the chamber with a mass spectrometer for the analysis of residual gases and other technologies that monitor the influence of the space environment on the given materials.
“A laser beam for the analysis of the tested components will also be fed into the chamber using two flanges,” pointed out Stará.
Chamber for the laser center
After a year of work, the company will also ship the ELIAS vacuum chamber for the ELI Beamlines laser research center in Dolní Břežany in April. It will be designed for vaporizing thin layers on large optical elements of ultra-intense lasers. Its parameters are impressive – a volume of fifteen cubic meters and a total weight of twelve tons.
Photo: Streicher Pilsen
ELIAS vaporization vacuum chamber for the laser research center
“Our company is exceptional in that, even with large devices, we can meet the highest cleanliness requirements that must be met for supplies to the semiconductor or optical industry,” said Lopata.
“In the past, we already delivered for ELI Beamlines, for example, equipment for the distribution of the laser beam or the vacuum chamber of laser compressors,” he added.
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