SBIR-STTR Award

NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and commercial industry have a pressing need for miniaturized, rugged, low mass, power efficient, high vacuum systems that can achieve vacuum pressures as low as 10E-8 torr while exhausting to greater than 1 atm. Advances in sensor technology at NASA and other government laboratories, in academia, and in industry, have led to the development of very small mass spectrometer detectors. However, the vacuum systems to support these sensors remain large, heavy, and power hungry. To meet this need, Creare proposes to build a compact vacuum pump based on the innovative combination of a turbomolecular pump to achieve hard vacuum pressures; a molecular drag pump to compress the gas through the transition regime of the gas; and a regenerative pump that compresses the gas further to exhaust to pressure greater than 1 atm. The pump represents an order-of-magnitude reduction in mass, volume, and power over current, commercially available, state-of-the-art vacuum systems that provide pumping over the same pressure range. Our unique vacuum pump design is based on technologies previously demonstrated at Creare that are combined in an innovative way to achieve the goal of providing vacuum pressures as low as 10E-8 torr while exhausting to greater than 1 atm in a small, low mass, power efficient package.

For a number of years Creare has developed, fabricated, and tested highly miniaturized, high vacuum pumps specifically designed for mass spectrometers used on NASA Mars missions. These pumps would also be useful on other missions to planets and satellites with atmosphere, such as Titan, as well as terrestrial applications on Earth. In order to allow these high vacuum pumps to operate in high-pressure environments such as exist on Titan and Earth, the vacuum pump needs to be supplemented with a rough pump that can take its exhaust and compress it to 1–1.5 atm. This project aims to design, fabricate, test, and deliver such a compact vacuum pump system that can generate a high vacuum, on the order of 1e-8 torr, and exhaust directly to an Earth or Titan atmosphere. The pump will be assembled in a very compact, robust, and low-power package. Our Phase I project clearly demonstrated the feasibility of our innovative design by demonstrating the performance of a rough pump and designing a compact vacuum system for use on Earth or other planetary bodies with atmospheric pressure greater than 1 atm. During Phase II of this project, we will build a complete benchtop pumping system that meets the requirements.