The effect of heat treatments and coatings on the outgassing rate of stainless steel chambers

TL;DR

This study investigates how heat treatments and surface coatings like TiN and a-Si affect the outgassing rates of stainless steel vacuum chambers, revealing significant reductions especially with heat treatments and TiN coatings, with implications for vacuum system performance.

Contribution

It provides new quantitative data on the effects of heat treatments and coatings on outgassing rates of stainless steel chambers, including the impact of different coatings and heat treatment sequences.

Findings

Heat treatment at 400°C reduces outgassing by nearly 20 times in uncoated steel.

TiN coating results in four orders of magnitude lower outgassing rates.

a-Si coatings show minimal change with heat treatments, but initial heat treatments can reduce outgassing effectively.

Abstract

The outgassing rates of three nominally identical 304L stainless steel vacuum chambers were measured to determine the effect of chamber coatings and heat treatments. One chamber was coated with titanium nitride (TiN) and one with amorphous silicon (a-Si) immediately following fabrication. The last chamber was first tested without any coating, and then coated with a-Si following a series of heat treatments. The outgassing rate of each chamber was measured at room temperatures between 15 and 30 {\deg}C following bakes at temperatures between 90 and 400 {\deg}C. Measurements for bare steel showed a significant reduction in the outgassing rate by nearly a factor of 20 after a 400 {\deg}C heat treatment (3.5x10-12 Torr L s-1 cm-2 prior to heat treatment, reduced to 1.7x10-13 Torr L s-1 cm-2 following heat treatment). The chambers that were coated with a-Si showed minimal change in outgassing rates with heat treatment, though an outgassing rate reduced by heat treatments prior to a-Si coating was successfully preserved throughout a series of bakes. The TiN coated chamber exhibited remarkably low outgassing rates, up to four orders of magnitude lower than the uncoated stainless steel, but the uncertainty in these rates is large due to the sensitivity limitations of the spinning rotor gauge accumulation measurement and the possibility of a small pump speed due to inhomogeneity in the TiN coating. The outgassing results are discussed in terms of diffusion-limited versus recombination-limited processes.