Reducing Contamination In Sealed Devices Through Residual Gas Analysis

By Author: Ors Labs
Total Articles: 4
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If you are dealing with a company that produces hermetically sealed devices then you can understand that how can the intrusion of trace gases play havoc with the manufactured component. Yes contamination by trace gases or moisture may seem as a non interfering issue but this is actually responsible for critical failures in a device. For example moisture can corrode the inside of the device and cause issues such as fogging leakage etc. Many times problems in area of internal lubrication of the component or errors in its working might start showing up due to such intruding elements.
If you manufacture quality device but are still facing problems in the working of the concerned product the problem can be due to internal contamination.
Hence it’s important for organizations like yours to keep a tab on it and a good technique in this regard could with residual gas analysis or the RGA.
What is Residual gas Analysis?
The technique employs specific residual gas analyzers that analyze the type of gas inside the device through specific methods. ...
... Most RGA’s work by converting the gas into a beam of ions. After converting to ions the resulting mixture is separated into individual ions by on the basis of their specific charge to mass ratios.
To determine these charge to mass ratios a residual gas analyzer consists of three basic parts such as ionizer, mass analyzer and ion detector. As the name suggests the ionizers breaks the gas into specific ions; the mass analyzer helps in determining the mass of them and detector determines the type.
Why RGA?
The best part with analysis services like RGA is that it is quite sensitive and provides accurate results to the users. Major organizations dealing with micro electronics, metals, ceramics, packaging, pharmaceutical equipment manufacturers and telecommunication one employ residual gas analysis to determine contamination in sealed components. Another advantage of this methodology is that it is non destructive which is what industries wish for.
This technique would run good if you are looking for a suitable technique for failure analysis or to determine outgassing in sealed devices or for process control and production applications.
If you wish to employ RGA at your organization then the best thing you can do is to search for specific companies online that offers such testing services. You can consult the issues you have with them and the concerned lab would suggest you with a solution for it.
The author is failure analysis engineer. In this article he explains how contamination in sealed devices be reduced with analysis services like RGA.