[3dem] plasma cleaner

[Christopher Winkler]

Hey Ed,

We went through a similar cost benefit analysis of plasma cleaners after
our Solarus RF board failed. We went with one of the more basic plasma
cleaners partly due to budget, partly due to the simplicity of operation of
the more basic units, and partly due to the simplicity of design of the
basic units. As you point out, the cost of a "simple" cleaner is 1/4 to 1/3
of the Solarus II. The Solarus was pretty easy to operate and the ability
to save recipes is nice, but the more basic plasma cleaners are even
simpler--you basically toggle a switch to start or stop the cleaner. There
is no ability to save a recipe on our cleaner but we only had a few saved
recipes on our Solarus that were routinely used. It's not hard to adjust
time and power on the basic units. Most importantly for me, the more basic
cleaners forego the TMP for a basic dry scroll pump so there are no
diaphragm pumps to rebuild or turbo oil bearings to swap, and there's no
painful teardown of the system to access the vacuum systems. The poorer
vacuum is fully sufficient to generate a good quality plasma and I've not
really seen much of a difference in cleaning performance--the new "simple"
model does a good job of cleaning and removing hydrocarbon contamination
(we don't use it for glow discharging or treating grid surfaces, so I can't
comment on that).

A downside of the basic cleaner is that it only uses one process gas at a
time, so you cannot switch between argon and oxygen mixtures or hydrogen
like the Solarus. This is not a problem for our application but it's
something to consider.

Happy to discuss specifics off of the listserv,
Chris

On Tue, Jan 24, 2023 at 5:17 PM Egelman, Edward H (ehe2n) <
egelman at virginia.edu> wrote:

> We have a Gatan Solarus that is failing, and are thinking about
> replacements. The newer Solarus II is from 5-10 times more expensive than
> the simplest plasma cleaners out there. Does anyone have any comparisons to
> justify this very high price tag?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ed
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Edward Egelman
>
> Harrison Distinguished Professor,
>
> Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
>
> Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics
>
> University of Virginia
>
> phone: 434-924-8210
>
> fax: 434-924-5069
>
> egelman at virginia.edu
>
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://egelmanlab.org/__;!!Mih3wA!EQBiSrdldpeZKdG9q0YNedYLR8usKTHGLIJxVHDs09kYZTgnVOnBPj86OJuAm4qW3tF3Vkde-sEGVLuSMC-9$ 
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