10kV here and 10kV there ...

Feb 04, 2007 25 Replies

I've seen multichannel programmable 10kV supplies that fit in a double- wide CAMAC slot. Not up to your voltage but close and at the time (80's) I thought they were pretty daringly dense.

SHV connectors were the standard. I don't know what you'd use for connectors at 23kV, can you give me a hint?

LeCroy doesn't make any fun CAMAC stuff anymore :-(.

Tim.

Yes, but its the surface moisture that forms during assembly of the part before potting. and in some cases its more than moisture and can lead to the RTV not bonding.

Cheers

Damned free newsreaders. Had to look on Google groups to see this thread. Email is john "dot" jardine "the 'at' symbol" idnet "dot" co "dot" uk For some reason GG will only allow posting using an addy I dumped a while back. (probably as well :) john

Certainly we cannot. The common RTV adhesives require moisture to cure, and emit acetic acid when they do cure.

Neither moisture nor acetic acid are acceptable here.

Potting compounds use other kinds of chemistry for this reason. If you try to exclude moisture and use the hardware-store adhesive, you get a gooey uncured fill material. Using the real commercial potting compounds, you get good results and pay lots more money.

The old C64 computers had a potted power supply that was famous for early failure; the potting compound often shrank and cracked, fracturing components as it did so.

Some years ago, I worked at some outfit that worked with high voltages routinely, except that they kept blowing stuff up, so my job, and my 3 co-workers', was to make stuff not blow up at

10 KV and so.

One of the successes was a sort of a brick - 24V or so in and

5 KV at about 50 mA out, the size and shape of a brick. Well, it was just an ordinary box, with the PCB mounted on standoffs near the bottom of the box, with a stack of big fat ceramic capacitors in a half-wave Cockroft-Walton multiplier. Well, there was some Dow Corning crystal clear two-part potting compound that stayed crystal clear, and also stayed as resilient and rubbery as cured RTV. It was about a hundred bucks a pint, but it got the job done, so we used it. The had a vacuum pump and bell jar on a bench, where anybody could walk up and put an item on the platform thingie, and pump it down. Well, they'd take these 5 KV bricks, and mix up a batch of this stuff, and pour it into a few of the bricks, and set them in the bell jar, them pump them down.

I.e., they pumped it down to evacuate all of the air, and since it was a 2-part thing, there probably wasn't all that much acetic acid involved. ;-)

My point is, getting the air out can help immensely, but you have to have a vacuum pump and bell jar.

Once we figured that out, the power supplies worked 100% - the big problem then was blowing up the sensors when something arced over in the big vacuum chamber (which they still called a bell jar), and I learned about Transzorbs, but that's a topic for a different thread. :-)

Cheers! Rich

Just don't visit any of the sites that Google returns for this search term or you'll never get all the pop-ups and spy ware off your PC.

Paul Hovnanian mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com ------------------------------------------------------------------ Life is like an analogy.

Join the Discussion

Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.

Didn't find your answer?

Ask the community — no account required