A novel ceramic chamber prototype

Abstract A novel ceramic chamber prototype has been designed and fabricated which is described in this paper. The manufacture procedure of the ceramic test chamber is original. For the novel ceramic chamber, the uniformity of its inner deposited Ti film is improved to have a thickness variation of approximately 1%, and the average wall thickness error of the chamber (length 650 mm) is developed to be less than 55 μm. The manufacture procedure is explained below. The two halves of ceramic chambers were first cleaned, the metal films were then deposited on the inner surface by sputtering and, finally, the two halves were joined with a fixture to become a ceramic tube using glass powder colloid at ∼250 °C. The glass powder colloid can be used for the vacuum-assembled parts because the outgassing rate is measured to be 4.8 × 10 −9  Pa m s −1 after baking. For a novel ceramic chamber prototype, the ceramic tube was connected to the stainless steel flange by glass powder colloid and tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding. The ceramic chamber prototype was leak tight after the rapid temperature cycle test. Thus, it is feasible to fabricate the novel ceramic chamber prototype.