Thursday, April 23, 2020

transformers vs iron dude

This post will be about the remaining two rack units, and a quick look at what's inside them. As I mentioned before, this vacuum chamber appeared to be used for the purpose of outgassing some kind of filaments (for mass spectrometers, maybe?). Once again, here's what inside the chamber looks like:

The image isn't blurry... You're just drunk!

You can see 3 banks of filament holders here, with each bank running to one of three cathode heating current power supply sections:

No, I didn't take a crappy pic.. You're just drunk.. Still.

A look inside will reveal what's going on:



Pretty simple. Without having actually delved into it, line voltage comes in and is routed to the switches on the front panel, which then runs through the beefy wire wound pots (which all look to be in good condition. Nice!), setting the current through the primary side of the transformers. The secondary side goes through the panel meters and then to the filament banks. This is entirely AC. The interesting bit is the pink wire that's seen coming in through the rear of the enclosure to the right. Where does that go?


You can see the pink wire on the upper left side. The upper grey box with the twisted wires coming out of it is the power supply we just looked at. The lower box that it's plugging in to is what appears to be for setting the filament emission current, and so the pink wire carried that return current. This must have been a timed process, hence the timer. This was purpose built, and maybe one off equipment.





Center top of the last image shows a brown wire soldered to what looks like some kind of coax connector. This is connected to a plate mounted to the top of the chamber lid, partially visible in the first image of the post. That completes the emission current circuit.

I will need a filament power supply for my experiments, but I'll want it to be regulated DC. I'll probably reuse some of the above components for that purpose.

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