Characterisation of a turbo-molecular pumps by a minimum of parameters

The design of complex vacuum systems including turbo-molecular pumps requires knowledge of the characteristics of the turbo-molecular pumps. Normally, such characteristics for commercially available turbo-molecular pumps are presented as graphs of pumping speed, compression ratio and so on as a function of inlet or outlet pressure. It is difficult to incorporate such information into a model for designing complex vacuum systems, especially when optimising the number of pumps, their pumping speed and choice of backing pump.Voss [Characteristics of the turbomolecular pumps. Vakuum in Forschung ung Praxis 2002;14(4)] has published fitting formulae for specific pumps as a way of describing pressure, pumping speed and compression at the inlet, by means of a number of parameters which are described in a table for each gas and throughput. These fitting formulae can be used in modelling, but the fitting parameters for an arbitrary pump are not in general available.A new approach is proposed based on ‘true zero-throughput’, which has been defined as the ratio of the probability of a gas molecule travelling from the pump inlet to the outlet to that of its travelling from the outlet to the inlet. This is different from the usually reported ‘zero-throughput’ data which are measured with zero gas injection, but not ‘zero gas load’ at the inlet (due to thermal outgassing of a measuring dome and the pump itself). Parameters in the formulae developed here are no longer simply fitting parameters, but have clear physical meaning. The dependence of the parameters for different gases may be included as a function of mass. The new formulae presented, allow us to model the performance of cascaded turbo-molecular pumps. As an example, the formalism is applied to the differential pumping stages of the KATRIN experiment [KATRIN Collaboration. KATRIN design report 2004. Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe Scientific Report # FZKA 7090, 2005].