Within AEON's Centre for Engineering & Research Space (CERES), developed to support the growing aerospace and R&D sectors across the North West and the Midlands, their Thermal Vacuum Chamber plays a crucial role in performing monitored ‘bakeout’ programmes for flight hardware and simulating a space environment.
This enables satellite instruments and entire Cubesats to be calibrated, configured, and fully flight-tested before launch.
AEON’s facility hosts a full complement of mechanical, optical, and thermal verification instrumentation, all of which is aimed to help technology startups, academics and instrument manufacturers access to space-testing facilities which will provide a means to test and qualify the next generation of space-technologies.
Our Large Thermal Vacuum Chamber is Ø1m x 1m (extendable to 3m in length on request) with 8 ISO-KF50 ports and an ISO-K500 port.
Using our TVAC AEON is able to offer:
• Bakeout to ESA & NASA Standards
• Turbomollecular Pump (up to 260l/s for N2)
• Dry Multi-Stage Roots Pump (up to 14 m3/h)
• Vacuum to 1×10-9 mbar measured in Chamber with an Inficon Vacuum Gauge continuously from amosphere to UHV
• Ultra-low loss Ø280mm Optical Feedthrough.
• Customisable stopping criteria (R Value Variation / Set Time Value)
• Design & supply of MGSE/OGSE/EGSE to facilitate Bakeout
• Auto-Isolation valve
Heating & Cooling:
• Customisable IUT Radiative Heating (Up to 200°C / 473K)
• Customisable Thermal Cycling Programs (+200 / -192°C) (473 / 81K)
• Customisable IUT Cooling (< 20°C / 293K)
• Up to 12 Temperature Probes
• LN2 Cold Trap available (-192°C / 81K at Cold Trap)
• Cold Plate available with Thermocouple Monitoring
Reporting:
• Bakeout Report (Temperature, Pressure, IUT Temperature)
• Supply of Raw Data (Chamber & IUT Monitoring)
• TML/CVCM Characterisation Report
• Bakeout Certificate of Conformance
Options:
• Dry N2 Purge available
• Residual Gas Analyzer (RGA) available, 1-200 amu Mass Range & Electron Multiplier
• Thermoelectric Quartz Crystal Microbalance (TQCM) (with thermally matched reference crystal and regeneration cycling).
• MoC / PAC Plates with FTIR Analysis
• ISO Class 8 Cleanroom
• ISO Class 7 Cleanroom
• ISO Class 5 Cleanroom.
