Instalaciones / Facilities

Two vacuum chambers are available in the laboratory for experiments with low density and energy plasmas. The large Arges plasma chamber is a cylinder two meters long and 0.8 m in diameter. It has multiple lateral accesses with a diameter of DN 100 ISOK and 40 KF that allow connecting the instrumentation and/or accessing the plasma inside. The front cover has a DN 250 ISOK diameter window that can also be transparent to allow visual inspection.







The baseline gas pressure of Arges vacuum tank is below 10-6 mbar and the working pressures for Argon mass flow rates below 1 sccm (1 ml per minute) are in the range between   5 10-6 and 5 10-5 mbar. Additionally, this plasma chamber also has a set of coils that allow a coaxial magnetic field to be applied to the plasma column. The photographs show a front and rear view of the Arges vacuum tank with its external coils when it was installed in 1996 in the Plasma Laboratory.

The small plasma chamber has been operational since 1992 and is also made from a 0.8 meter long, 0.4 meter diameter stainless steel cylinder. It has two 20 cm diameter side access ports and additional 40 KF/25 KF normalized connectors for instrumentation. Its Argon baseline pressure is 10-6 and the working pressures for gas inlet flows below 1 sccm (1 ml per minute) are between 10-5-10-4 mbar.

This vacuum tank is equipped with computer controlled positioning system that allows plasma probes to be dislaced in 3-D. The photograph shows three plasma dignostics (RFEA, Langmuir and emissive probes) that are employed for physical characterization of fast plasma streams.

Finally, experiments are usually conducted from the nearby control room of the phothograph at the far right where is available most of the electronic equipment and data acquisition systems.