Design and construction of a compact vacuum furnace for scientific research

Abstract

The design, construction, and measurement of a compact vacuum furnace are reported. This type of furnace has many scientific applications in material processing and growth research. One example is the fluxless bonding process, where elevated temperature is needed to melt the solder and vacuum environment is required to inhibit solder oxidation. The primary objective of the furnace design is to keep the vacuum enclosure cool using only natural convection while allowing the heating platform to reach high temperature. This characteristic is necessary to enable us to seal the vacuum chamber using O-rings. To achieve this, the platform was designed to be thermally isolated from the chamber enclosure. Heat losses from the platform by conduction, convection, and radiation were analyzed. The dominating loss was found to be caused by the blackbody radiation, which can thus be used to estimate the relationship between platform temperature and the drive power needed. With a graphite platform of 75×75×25mm3, only 270W of power is needed to drive the platform to 400°C. At this temperature, the temperature of the furnace enclosure is below 55°C, allowing O-rings to be used to seal the vacuum chamber. Using a mechanical pump, the furnace can be pumped down to 40mTorr, which is low enough for our fluxless bonding processes. With a temperature controller, the platform temperature can be controlled within 1%. The heat-up time to 400°C is only 7min.