[3dem] Cleaning water cooling pipe inside the camera assembly

[Andrzej Żak]

W dniu 2019-03-29 o 16:53, Joseph Wang pisze:
> Dear all,
>
> I have a question regarding cleaning the water cooling pipe inside the 
> camera assembly and would hope to get any comment on it.
>
> We have a Gatan Oneview Camera attached to our TEM and recently we 
> found that the flowrate has dropped from 15L/hr to 2 L/hr. We have 
> cleaned the water cooling tube outside the camera box and has flushed 
> out many green-ish stuff (as attached in the image). Note that we have 
> also installed a filter for the chiller, but it didn't pick this up. 
> And now we would like to clean the water cooling pipe inside the 
> camera assembly. Has anyone done this before? What detergent / 
> cleanser could we use? How long could we leave it in the water cooling 
> pipe before flushing it out?
>
Dear Joe,

In such problems we use counterflow with clean water, without any 
special addition. If pipes are heavily contaminated, I would use a mild 
sodium hydroxide solution and do a strong rinse with clean water. We had 
the same issue in one of our SEMs, green stuff blocked water pressure 
reducer. Since then we use algaecides on our own responsibility, if we 
use a water cooler. If you are not sure, you should consult the camera 
and chiller manufacturer. In some devices we use glycol in the chiller, 
then the problem does not occur.

Best regards

AZ

-- 
PhD Eng. Andrzej Żak
Electron Microscopy Laboratory
Wroclaw University of Science and Technology
ul. Smoluchowskiego 25, p. 201
50-372 Wrocław
tel. (+48)883314999
e-mail: andrzej.zak at pwr.edu.pl