[3dem] two Talos Arctica questions

[Morgan, David Gene]

Hi,

We continue to have two annoying problems with our Arctica, and I'd like to know whether this is just our microscope or if other have the same problems...

  1.  The minor issue is that the instrument seems to often forget the position of the objective aperture.  The UI reports that the aperture status is "unknown" and multiple things will not happen when this occurs.  We can sometimes (but not always) reset this by telling the instrument to insert the aperture and then to remove it.  Our service engineer tells us that the solution is to do this insert/retract step, but I am wondering whether this really means that something in our aperture hardware/software is not working properly.  Any experiences that others have would be appreciated.
  2.  The much more major issue involves what happens when there is an interruption to the chilled water flow.  On our instrument, the optics board immediately overheats and the camera chillers follow that shortly.  Those are minor issues that can be easily fixed regardless of how long the chilled water is off.  However, if the chilled water is off for "long enough," the turbo pump in the autoloader shuts off and cannot/will not restart.  This in turn means that the dewars cannot refill, and that the autoloader warms up.  It also means that the cassette and any grids in the instrument will warm up because the cassette cannot be removed - without the TMP, the vacuum system can't work properly, and a grid can neither be taken off the stage, nor can the entire cassette be unloaded.  This problem with the TMP seems like it is either a serious design flaw in the instrument (if this is what others experience) or that something is fundamentally wrong with our instrument/turbo.  And in case anyone is wondering, by the time we know that the chilled water will be out for long enough to worry about samples in the microscope, the turbo has quit and it's impossible to salvage the grids.


Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

--
    politics is more difficult than physics.
                                             A. Einstein

            David Gene Morgan
        Electron Microscopy Center
             047E Simon Hall
             IU Bloomington
          812 856 1457 (office)
          812 856 3221 (3200)
      https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://iubemcenter.indiana.edu__;!!Mih3wA!GO-4plo-39YzB7bNOTdnH_GWKkUAPDMP-geWXhR4hQWJphA0hMy6K-BhgYgz-bvZyIN9pMDMZnJYOLIcWDEu-mQ$ 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ncmir.ucsd.edu/pipermail/3dem/attachments/20231114/ec71b828/attachment.html>