Fred's World of Science: Cyclotron II |
The research was conducted my Senior year in high school (1994-5)
Here's the cyclotron vacuum chamber. The white feedthroughs are for the attachment of the RF high voltage to the D's (not shown). The copper pipe normal to the pipe is the vacuum line. The D's have screw posts on the side for attachment to the RF power supply leads (curled copper wire). You can clearly see the target in the upper left hand corner of the picture. The light is bouncing off of the surface nicely. The target was hard soldered on and de-fluxed and cleaned before each experiment. Copper was chosen for the target metal for thermal reasons, and the possibility of making short-lived low energy isotopes over longer-lived isotopes from different target materials. |
The heater element in the center of the chamber is the ion source for the cyclotron. The D's are shown in their proper place. At the bottom of the picture, you can see the plate where the accelerated ions hit. The feedthroughs were attached using vacuum wax. The chamber walls are made of stainless steel. The D's are made of brass. The heater is nichrome wire, and the current through the heater shown is about 2.5A. |
This is what the project looked like when it was setup at the science fair. That is me standing next to it (senior year). The project was somewhat imposing. It exactly filled the space allotted. It was about 8' by 4' by 3', I seem to remember. The black background with text outlined in yellow became a pretty often mimicked style. I guess I became somewhat of a science fair trendsetter. |
On the left is a picture of the outgassing with the magnetic field strength up. Notice "hot spots" in the plasma, as it is being bent magnetically. On the right is the cyclotron chamber while I was cleaning the Ds off for the next experiment. The bottle in the foreground is the solvent I used the clean the brass off (xylene and acetone). |
These two pics show the cyclotron in operation. On the top, I am checking the stability of the oscillation as I measure the output. On the bottom, I am re-tuning the tank circuits of the push-pull while I change the frequency of the driving voltage. |
This is the high voltage RF power supply I built to supply the RF power to the Ds in the cyclotron chamber. The tubes are RCA 811A's, operating at about 200W per tube. They were hot! The white PVC pipe coils are the input and output coupling transformers for the amplifier. There were multiple Taps on the transformer, allowing me to have several different resonant bands for the amplifier. The varible caps on the top are providing the tuning for the output and input stages of the amp. Each had to be balanced, or the push pull would collapse, and the tubes would implode. |
The magnet power supply was designed around the variac that I had purchased. On the bottom, you can see the meters and their shunts. The meter on the right uses a short length of 12 Ga copper wire for the current shunt. On the upper left, you can see the large bridge rectifier on a heat sink. Notice the heavy 10ga wire used in the supply to reduce resistive losses at 22A. You can see on the bottom left a 40A contactor. On the right side, you see 9 1000uF 250V capacitors in brown, and on the bottom two 2000uF 250V capacitors. This gave me a total filter capacitance of 13000uF. I initially thought of adding a large filter inductor to the circuit, but it occurred to me that the magnet itself would be a great inductance for the power supply. So, when I powered the magnet at full blast 22A, I had a ripple in the supply voltage of less than 1V (out of 89V). |
Here is a far clearer picture of the essentials of the vacuum system used in the first and second cyclotrons. The Bell jar in the center is the thermocouple gauge. Note the twisted pair wires that attach to the top of the canning lid through the old diode feedthroghs. To its right, the molecular sieve trap. I used the 1 quart size Bell jar, and attached a fill and draw tap in the top with 3/8" flexible copper pipe. The jar was filled with several clean, new polyurethane shop cloths. Cutting across the right side is the purge/fill line and purge valve. Behind the old "Duo-Seal" is barely visible. On the left is the small diffusion pump. You can see the "Tygon" tubing water leads and the vacuum hoses attached to it. The silver soldered pieces are not visible off the left of the picture. |
Copyright Fred M. Niell, III 2005