Put together a much needed vacuum system for my fume hood entirely out of spare parts I had lying around. The pump, pressure switch and gauge actually came from a professional vacuum apparatus but I took it apart to repurpose it for myself, it also had a little compressor which I may or may not make use of at some point. The tank is from a pressure equalizer and everything else is just stuff I already had.
The construction is pretty simple and self explanatory. I added a trap full of indicating silica gel to remove moisture, there will also be an overflow trap between the outlet and whatever I am using it on. If I wish to vacuum distill any acids then I will just add a bubbler with saturated NaOH.
In my original design the valve and gauge were going to be in different spots so thats why I ran two hoses but I wasn’t really thinking about that after I changed it. I should have just put a tee on the main line, it’s purely asthetic though…
In all the system works really well and I didn’t have to bother with finding leaks so that was nice. The pump goes down to 400mBar and shuts off, it kicks back on at 500mBar.
Nuclear and High Voltage Science 