“It’s like I told you, I ordered these flanges and messed up our vacuum vessel. How was I supposed to know it would short out the system?”
Did you know that when Niels Bohr was just a young Dane studying at the University of Copenhagen he nearly killed himself when he tried to run an electric feedthrough into a vacuum chamber with a stainless steel flange?
Think about the implications: no Rutherford-Bohr atom?!
Okay, that’s not true. But Niels Bohr could have electrocuted himself; and, more to the point, the other scientists and physicists we build custom viewports and feedthroughs for, could be a grave danger if they’re not assembling their vacuum vessel hardware correctly.
At the very least, and admittedly more likely, similar to the “clueless old dude” in the picture above (Way to name your pictures, Shutterstock!), thousands of scientists across the globe are destroying their vacuum chambers with inadequate hardware and lackluster installation procedures.
If you know MPF at all (and if you don’t shame on you), you know that we’re one of a small number of precision ceramic-to-metal parts manufacturers’ for your vacuum systems.
What you probably didn’t know is that we also have the ability and expertise to mount our viewports and feedthroughs to your UHV chamber.
In short, we not only make custom parts, but possess the know-how to attach said parts to both standard and specialty hardware: we install custom flanges, mounts, and plates.
There are good reasons to have MPF both engineer your parts and weld them to your piping system.
Remember our good friend Niels Bohr? As we already established, we don’t know that he almost electrocuted himself early in his career–although, to be fair, we definitely don’t know that he didn’t almost electrocute himself.
But, let’s look at another, non-lethal, scenario: suppose Bohr was on the precipice of discovering the Rutherford-Bohr atom (who is Rutherford by the way? Was he Niels Bohr’s Art Garfunkel?) when his vacuum chamber shorted out.
Rutherford was no help in this situation. In fact, he screamed at Bohr, sending him into a tailspin of depression and regret. Bohr ended up retiring as a physicist, and took up painting instead. He became famous as the originator of the “crying clown” painting.
In this scenario, not only do we lose a great physicist, but we “gain” those damn crying clown paintings. (Btw: If you are a fan of crying clown art, MPF does not want your business. Buy your parts and vacuum flanges elsewhere.)
If only MPF had been in Denmark circa 1905! You see, when we weld your viewport or feedthrough to your UHV vessel we make sure your flange connects, completely hermetic and leak-tight.
When MPF designs a piece, we own it. Often when we talk to our clients about what went wrong in mounting one of our components to their vacuum chamber, they complain about not being able to achieve a hermetic seal or destroying the piping components.
We’ve found that our customers waste a lot of precious time and money when they try to weld vacuum components to their vessels themselves. We’re not trying to discourage the DIY UHV chamber engineers (actually we are), but, at MPF, we want our clients in the scientific community to be doing science, not wasting their time in manufacturing their precision equipment.
At MPF, we use a variety of flanges for mounting our components to your vacuum chamber: conflat flanges, ISO Flanges KF/QF (Qwik, Kwik, Clamp, and Claw Style), Wire-Seal Flanges, ASA/ANSI flanges, JIS (Japan-Industry Standard) flanges, among others. We have stainless steel (304, 305, 316, and 316LN), and titanium flanges.
If the made-up experience of our buddy Niels Bohr taught us anything, it’s that you want professional engineers with decades of experience, like those at MPF, to mount your components to your vacuum vessels.
The alternative is almost too terrible to mention:
