testing NTC caps

We actually have a nitrogen system for the P+P oven. Maybe we should pipe it up to engineering in our new building.

My lab at IBM had several lines piped round the walls: house vacuum, dry nitrogen, clean nitrogen, 0.1M DI water, 18M DI water, helium, and hydrogen. Super convenient.

It was room 08-129, directly below the silicon fab and across the hall from my office. One summer about 25 years ago now, the guy kept coming on the PA to exhort everyone to reduce helium usage, which was at an all-time high. At the annual Labor Day shutdown, they noticed that helium use stayed high, so it finally penetrated that there was a leak.

Turned out that some contractor had cracked a fluoride (HF) drain in the tool core right behind the back wall of my lab, and HF was dripping all over the piping. It had eaten through the helium line, but fortunately not the methane or hydrogen lines.

Could have been an entertaining bang.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

HF was one of the chemicals that made my father shudder; a bang wouldn't have been necessary.

He was a chemical engineer, starting in zinc smelting and gradually moving to two-phase flow in turbines and nuclear reactors.

I gather that one tries not to have the steam get too wet because it eats t urbine blades. His expertise was obviously very valuable if he could preven t that sort of thing.

My dad was a manager with Cominco Ltd., a big nonferrous metals producer. T he summer I was 12 (1972) he needed to go on a tour of their mines in BC an d the Northwest Territories, and he took me along. That was probably the mo st thrilling trip of my whole life--I got to go underground in a deep mine (all the way to the working face), carry a 40-pound bar of gold, and look after the control yoke of a Piper Apache most of the way across Great Slave Lake from Hay River to Yellowknife, while the bush pilot pretended to look out the side window. ;)

I spent a couple of days in Pb/Zn, gold, and mercury smelters. They were li ke the throne room of the Great Oz, except that they did something real.

As you can probably tell, I miss my dad a lot, even though he's been gone 2

Hoping to see him again, one day.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Silane is the one that makes the entertaining bang. ;-)

It's pyrophoric in air, though, so a leak would ignite immediately before i t could build up to any serious level.

My first good boss at IBM told the story of watching a guy coming down the hall at Watson (801 building) carrying a bare glass globe of arsine gas for the upstairs fab. For some inscrutable reason this genius was holding it i n his hand instead of in a neoprene boot. He tripped on something and went arse over teakettle a few yards from my boss.

Knowing that if that globe broke, he and probably several others would die fairly horribly, the guy managed to pivot in mid-air and land heavily on hi s back, holding it to his chest. So what he lacked in brains he sort of m ade up in football.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Genuine LOL. Also generally true of footballers as a group.

Precisely, except "too wet" is better expressed as "even slightly wet". Even in normal operating conditions, they become moth-eaten, and are mildly entertaining to look handle.

And then there are the nukes that twist and turn all over the place...

Never been down a mine. Ever since seeing the 5 yard section of a coal mine in the Science Museum as a kid, I've wanted to go down a pit. Given there's such a tourist attraction about an hour away, there's no excuse for not having done it.

As for flying, that had to wait until later; I learned to fly at the same time as my daughter, and she was a solo pilot before she could start to learn to drive.

I still remember, as a 5yo, looking into the boiler's burners in a tiny coal-fired power station.

My consolation is that he was no longer enjoying life, and the end was fast: his aorta split where the valve had been inserted.

I used to work in engine rooms of just-built steamships (designed throttle and boiler controls.) All the high-pressure piping was welded, and a pinhole leak in a weld would make a tiny, invisible jet of steam that could cut your arm, or head, off. If that was suspected, people would wave a broomstick around the welds, and a leak would cut the end off.

Old mines and factories and such are often sad and beautiful.

most stark landscapes I've ever experienced on this planet.

And lots of warnings about illegal mining of diamonds and platinum. China is building the world's 2nd largest uranium mine near Kolmanskop.

(the new regime wanted to change the name of the town to something with two distinctly different clicks- unpronounceable by most people- probably not good for getting Germans to visit their pre-WWI old colonial holding). They settled for changing the region name.

--sp