Turbomolecular vacuum pumps are used in areas that require a clean high or ultra-high vacuum. Examples include research and development as well as industrial applications such as the coating industry and analytical measuring devices.
Essentially, a turbomolecular pump is a turbine that rotates rapidly in a housing. The turbine stages are equipped with rotor blades, while stationary stator disks, which have blades in opposite directions, are arranged between the rotating rotor blades.
By transmitting torque from the rotating rotor blades to gas molecules, the initially disordered thermal motion of the gas molecules is converted into a directed motion from the inlet flange of the pump in the axial direction to the front vacuum flange.
In the molecular flow range (i.e. at pressures below 10-3mbar (0.75 x10-3 Torr)), the mean free path of the gas molecules is greater than the distance between the rotor and stator blades, which is usually a few tenths of a millimeter. As a result, the molecules collide mainly with the optically dense rotor blades, which leads to an extremely efficient pumping effect.
In the laminar (constant) flow region (i.e. at pressures above 10-1mbar (0.75 x 10-1 Torr)), the action of the rotor is impaired by frequent collisions between the molecules themselves. For this reason, a turbomolecular pump is not suitable in the