Reports until 17:54, Monday 12 August 2024
LHO VE
janos.csizmazia@LIGO.ORG - posted 17:54, Monday 12 August 2024 (79526)
8-12 vent vacuum diary
Today's activities:
- After reaching ~1.6E-6 Torr in the Corner (according to BSC3's gauge), GV1 was opened. This immediately brought down the corner pressure to ~9E-7 Torr
- A few hours after this, GV2 was also opened. This quickly brought down the pressure further to ~6.5E-7 Torr
- Opening up of GV1 and GV2 was 2 steps of a strategy, which used the Y and X manifolds as "vacuum accumulators" (the turbo pumps were switched on these volumes for the entire vent, so the pressure in these volumes was very low - ~2-3E-8 Torr). This came with immediate pressure drops, and now there is 6500 l/s pumping speed in the corner instead of the 2500 l/s. This means now a ~15 m^3/h real throughput instead of ~1.5 m^3/h before these actions
- Because of these openings, the pressure in CP2 started to rise slowly, because GV7 was only soft-closed. So, after reaching 3.4E-9 Torr, more pressure was applied to GV7 - it was noticed, that most likely because of the inst. air actions, the pressure there was very low, <5 psi. Now it was set to ~12 psi, and so CP2 pressure stabilized

The pressures currently:
- Corner (at BSC3): 6.1E-7 Torr
- HAM6: 7.4E-7 Torr
- HAM7 + Relay tube: 2.64E-7 Torr
Images attached to this report