As part of our scattershot marketing effort, I was given the opportunity to teach EVERYTHING ABOUT VACUUM TECHNOLOGY to a bunch of employees at a plant largely involved in metallurgical vacuum, that is furnaces and heat treatment. I hadn’t been up against a blackboard or its equivalent in a long time, so this got me thinking about how arcane and fractionated the world of vacuum technology is. I started with units, of course, and realized that the practical mess caused by all of our non-SI, weird units involving mercury columns, inches of water, pieces of a standard atmosphere etc., could not be explained in a few minutes. Explaining gauges and measurement without resorting to any physics proved also to be problematical, so I moved on to pumps and pumping. Here, I was on more solid ground, as there are good analogies to things like compressors, turbines, engines and so forth.
I forged ahead with maintenance, as I realized that at Cooke, we had seen almost every variety of ordinary and exotic vacuum problems close up, including leak checking and repair on elephantine systems. People were paying attention, and asking good questions, like how to find a leak in a water cooling jacket, but at the end, a few people wanted to learn more, and I struck out. I have a few engineering texts that I mention, and a few tech sections of vendor catalogs that are worthwhile, and there are AVS courses, but at the basic end of the instructional spectrum, there is a vacuum ….so to speak.
So here’s the question: Anybody out there know about the availability of a non-mathematical general introduction to practical vacuum technology? Say, something that would be useful to a maintenance tech, or as a primer for those who might later be interested in the details? Something recent, perhaps with weblinks? Let us know.
