Watch that crud in your crude!

Maintenance Tips, Testing

Oil is often thought of exclusively as a lubricant but in mechanical vacuum pumps oil serves a number of critical functions. Besides acting as a lubricant the pump oil provides a seal between close tolerance mechanical components that direct the movement of gasses for...

Vacuum Tip: Read and Plot Your Vacuum Performance

Maintenance Tips

Vacuum system pumps and components can deteriorate over time, and recording their performance when they’re functioning well can be a good predictive maintenance tool. We have found a nice way to do just that with a digital vacuum gage that can read pressure over...

Tips & Techniques: Leak Checking a Vacuum System

Maintenance Tips

Leaks in a vacuum furnace or chamber can be troublesome and time-consuming to locate. It’s important to have an understanding of how to set up your leak detector properly and then connect it to run a thorough troubleshooting routine. Geoff Humberstone has...

On-board Sensors Reduce Maintenance

Maintenance Tips

Some customers with multiple furnaces look for remote monitoring of their vacuum pumps to simplify the maintenance and reduce downtime. We have developed and installed several onboard vacuum pump sensor packages called Pump Sentinel to do that. Active pump monitoring...

Helium Blower: Fix Trouble Fast

Testing

Trouble in the system: Is it the pump, blower, or furnace? It’s Monday morning and you can’t pump your workhorse furnace below 40 millitorr. You have helium leak-checked the most obvious spots and there are no leak indications. You have bled in a “puff” of helium into...

Filtration Can Extend Pump Life

Maintenance Tips

Q: Why Use Filters on a Vacuum Pump? A: Because they can add years of life and lower costs of ownership. There are many processes using vacuum pumps to improve properties such as vacuum casting, brazing and PM sintering. Depending on process conditions, they can also...

Conversion Chart

Testing

Here’s a handy chart to have when you need to change units. MULTIPLY BY TO GET ATM 760 Torr ATM 1013.25 mbar ATM 14.696 PSI microns 1.3328X10-3 mbar microns 1X10-3 Torr microns 133.28X10-3 Pa l/min 3.53X10-2 CFM l/sec 2.119 CFM Contact us at 269-543-4291, Fax:...

Testing: The Thermocouple and Pirani Gauges

Resources, Testing

At MHV we test each and every pump that is shipped out of our facility. Testing validates our workmanship has met the standard of quality and that each system performs within specification. For oil booster pumps we conduct throughput testing and on diffusion pumps we...

Testing: The Hot Cathode Ionization Gauge

Resources, Testing

Gas Ionization gauges enable measurement of pressure at very low densities in atmospheres like those encountered in high vacuum environments. The Hot Cathode ion gauge (Bayard-Alpert gauge) is not a true pressure gauge, it actually measures the particle density using...