Why You Need a Ceramic to Metal Feedthrough | MPF

Why You Need a Ceramic to Metal Feedthrough for Your Vacuum Assembly

Ceramic to Metal Sealing: The World’s Most Hermetic Seal

With all due respect to the good folks at J-B Weld, we at MPF are more than a little dubious that their glue offers “The World’s Strongest Bond.” Sure, J-B Weld epoxy is great if you’re plugging up a crack in your pool or if you’re crafting an antique picture frame out of scraps of wood you found scavenging in the forest—btw, kudos to you for all that awesome forest scavenging—but if you need a completely hermetic, leak-proof seal for the feedthroughs or isolators in your vacuum assembly, you will want to give MPF at call.

Why do you need ceramic to metal feedthroughs for your ultra high vacuum assembly?

Don’t worry: we’ll break it down for you.

Feedthroughs (whether you’re feeding through power, gas, or fluid) and isolators need to be airtight so pesky particles—those subatomic menaces—don’t get into your ultra high vacuum chamber and muck up your scientific experiment or application. 

There you are about to blast an atom with some 100,000 volts of juice, and here come those irritating little protons, fouling up your airtight vacuum environment. We know from experience that one errant proton can ruin a particle accelerator enriching uranium. (Note: MPF’s legal representation from the offices of Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe tells us “we DO NOT know” about enriching uranium “from experience.” This is, in fact, just a figure of speech.) 

So, how does one keep their vacuum chamber free from unwanted particles?

Like your mother-in-law, particles need only the smallest opening to wedge themselves into a situation in which they’re unwanted and completely ruin your day. In order to make sure that they don’t get in, you need an airtight seal at the “joint” where you’re running your feedthrough into your vacuum chamber. 

Epoxy or glue might be used to seal a joint, or, alternatively one may use an elastomer O-ring. But for the vacuum assembly that needs to be completely hermetic, for the most demanding applications to prevent leakage, with fluctuations in temperature, humidity, and pressure, more often than not only a ceramic seal will do.

Ceramic feedthroughs are ceramic to metal fabrications—MPF uses a proprietary formula, our own special sauce—in which the ceramic bonds to the metal, like the teeth of a wolverine sinking into a reuben sandwich (wolverines love reuben sandwiches; we do know this from experience) creating an airtight seal so that you can happily transmit the highest currents, the most volatile gases, or the most unstable fluids into your hermetically sealed chamber without leakage.

An ultra high vacuum assembly with ceramic to metal feedthroughs provides high mechanical strength and optimal electrical insulation—they are designed to maintain uber-ultra high levels of vacuum, in which joint integrity is maintained even at extreme temperatures and in the harshest of harsh environments.

Specific Types of Ceramic to Metal Feedthroughs

There are many different types of feedthroughs, and MPF carries them all. We have one of the largest inventories nationwide of this stuff.

Do you need a water-cooled power feedthrough because the high temperatures of your application necessitate cooling? We have you covered.

Do you require a high-voltage feedthrough? FYI: most consider a high-voltage feedthrough any feedthrough that offers between 20 kv and 100 kv. At MPF (brushing dirt off our shoulders), we can design ceramic to metal feedthroughs above 100 kv for customized applications. 

Additionally, we have 1-pin, 2-pin, and mult-ipin, and thermocouple feedthroughs that can handle heavy volts and amperage. In short, if it’s ceramic to metal feedthrough you need for your high vacuum assembly, MPF has the market pretty much sewn up.

Ceramic v Glass

Jordan v LeBron; Ali v Frazier; Batman v Joker; Ceramic v Glass. What do these all have in common? Well they are all great rivalries that might be up for debate. But, let MPF settle it for you: Jordan, Ali, Batman, Ceramic. (We have this kid in accounting, twenty-five-years old, sweet kid, who keeps insisting that LeBron is better than Jordan. Joe [not his real name], when LeBron takes a year off to play golf, and then comes back to three-peat with the Lakers, we’ll give you that raise you keep asking for.)  

Ceramic feedthroughs just provide better performance than glass in most applications. They offer superior resistance to thermal and mechanical shock, greater protection against leakages, and resist corrosion better than Ali dancing around Frazier’s blows in the Thrilla in Manila.

Glass feedthroughs perform fine in situations of fluctuating temperatures, pressure, and humidity, but when you need a ultra high vacuum, ceramic to metal seals simply can’t be beat.

The cost of ceramic to metal feedthroughs, for the reasons listed above, are higher than glass-to-metal, and you’ll likely need experts, such as the engineers and designers at MPF, to build your vacuum assembly, but there really is no comparison between the two when it comes to the technical advantages in the tightness of the seal. Ceramic beats glass or any other material hands down when it comes to hermetically sealing your vacuum environment.   

Applications for Ceramic Feedthroughs

Below is a list of some of the applications that use ceramic to metal feedthroughs:

• High-vacuum connectors (of course!)
• Mass spectrometry (Not to be confused with tandem mass spectrometry or quadrople mass analysis, although we think it likely it could be used in these applications as well.
• Particle Accelerators (We can’t sell to the Iranians, but if you’re in American defense, drop us a line).
• Aerospace Engineering (We don’t make the rocket ships you buy, we make the rocket ships you buy better).
• Gas Lasers 
• Deep Sea Penetrators (Sail the seas, swim in the seas, and penetrate the seas!)

The Future of MPF Feedthroughs

We will continue to design, engineer, and build the strongest and tightest ceramic to metal feedthroughs for our partners in industry and the scientific community. We sincerely believe that we can do better: provide even higher voltages and more amperage on our feedthroughs. While we invest in constructing the best ceramic to metal feedthroughs, MPF’s researchers in the Speculative Engineering Department will also continue to focus on perfecting the recipe for Proto-Adamantium.