15.9.99

« Orange » cryostat user’s manual

 

Description

 

Cooling

 

Pre-cooling

Before any cooling :

-         the outer jacket should be pumped

-         make sure to purge the whole circuits with helium (to avoid blocking the needle valve in particular)

-         make sure that the capillary tube through the coils is well opened (flush helium through it)

-         pre-cool the magnet with nitrogen for 2 days so that the coil is at 100K
Be careful, when the cryostat is hot, nitrogen evaporates quickly and you have to fill it at least twice a day (you may use the « Tempotacs »)

-         Once the cryostat is pre-cooled, you must pre-cool the coil down to 5K with helium

 

 Coils cooling

-         DO NOT directly transfer helium, it is hopeless, use the transfer rod with can be screwed onto the capillary which flows through the coils.

-         Transfer helium slowly at a rate of about 30-50 l/min.

-         Monitor the temperature on the sensors (Coils). First look at the Pt sensors, it will steadily decrease down to 20K. Below that, the reading is meaningless, Look at the Carbon sensor, its resistance will rather quickly increase, from 200 to 350.
It should then rise rather quickly (1 min) to 390 ohms and the gas flow should drop to 15 l/min. => the transfer has started

-         As a general rule, the gas output should barely freeze.

-         The steady state is obtained for 414 ohms and the helium flow is then of about 4l/min.

 

Temperature measurements

 

The temperature is automatically recorded as soon as the temperature controller is connected to the GPIB port.

To cool down the sample down to helium temperature, force some helium flow through the needle valve by partly closing the red valve. Be careful, if you completly close the red valve, there might be an overpressure and the transfer hole cap may pop out. No more helium will flow throughthe needle valve and the temperature of the sample will increase.

There is an diameter adapter. To make sure that the cap will not pop out, take out the adapter and put the big one. It holds much better and the sealing is better.

 

 

Problemes de gel du sample rod freezing.

 

Bad luck you’ve frozen the sample rod in the sample space. Heat up the sample up to 80K, to unfreeze the air. It should be ok then

?? (heat with which heater?)

 

Magnet operation

 

 

Resetting the super-conducting shields

 

Take the “versatile black cable”. Connect it to the output named “Bobines”.

There are two small resistances stuck on the two super-conducting shields. If there are vortices trapped into these shields, you have to reset them to expel the vortices otherwise the flipping ratio

Find a small 20V power supply.

Set the flippers to -+, if there are vortices, the flipping ratio should be very bad (close to 1 or 2).

Slowly apply some current (max 100mA) into both resistors (total resistance 200 ohms if mounted in parallel. At some stage when the shields are heated above their Curie temperature, there is a sudden switch to good flipping ratios (if everything was properly set before)