Vacuum Cells & Plasma Tubes Services

Jodon offers glass blowing and high vacuum services for producing quality laser and plasma tubes, and other specialty vacuum devices. These services include single-piece, small lot, or quantity production of Jodon designed products; or designs fabricated and processed to customer furnished specifications. Typical products include vacuum cells with Plano-Plano windows, or cells with custom lenses. Additionally, non-ionizing telescopes, absorption cells, discharge and plasma tubes, and even light bulbs are routinely produced to the highest quality standards.

Vacuum processing using non-backstreaming turbo-molecular pumps permits ulta-clean, hydrocarbon-free pumping to vacuum levels of 10E-8 Torr or greater.

Cleanroom handling of all tubalations, windows, lenses, and mirrors, together with a high temperature bake-out during final processing, ensures that all tubes produced are of the highest possible quality.

Back-filling of pressure vessels, with specified gassing parameters, including exact mixtures and partial pressures, is an art developed by Jodon over a period of nearly 40 years. Helium 3, Helium 4, Neon 20, and Neon 22, Nitrogen, Methane, Argon, and Krypton are some of the gasses customarily used in processing these special purpose tubes and other devices. Current Jodon production procedures ensure cleanliness in assembly, high temperature degassing and pump-down to ultra high vacuum conditions. The pump-down and gas processing devices are highly efficient and insure the virtual elimination of all “active gasses” (i.e., undesirable products) from the finished discharge tube or lamp envelop. There is, nonetheless, an opportunity for minimal amounts of gaseous impurities to exist within the pressure vessel following the most arduous processing. Those unavoidable impurities can react with the internal components of the product and cause progressive and irreversible deterioration of the products’ performance.

The extent to which these minimal impurities effects are harmful depends upon the type of product being processed, and the nature of the gaseous impurities involved. The most efficient, and least expensive way to eliminate such impurities, while maintaining an ultra-clean gas mixture during the products’ lifetime, is to use an appropriate “getter”. A getter is a device placed in the tube which is designed to capture and permanently bind molecules of active gaseous impurities that come into contact with it during normal excited state operation. Jodon uses both flash (evaporable) and flashless (non-evaporable) getters to remove residual gaseous impurities by reacting chemically with them to form a gas which does not form a stable chemical compound. The only gas that does form a chemical compound is hydrogen. That gas is absorbed by the getter and permanently isolated from the desired gas mixture, thereby further purifying the mixture.

Customer furnished tubes and other vessels needing evaluation, or further processing are welcome as well. Contact Jodon and discuss your special requirements, and become acquainted with some qualified practitioners of the art of high vacuum tube processing.