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Metallically Sealed Demountable Titanium

Window of Industrial Accelerators
RESEARCH APRIL 2015
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4214.2248

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Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technol
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Retrieved on: 12 August 2015

Metallically Sealed Demountable Titanium Window of Industrial Accelerators

Abhay Kumar
Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, Indore - 452013, India.

Electronic mail: abhay@rrcat.gov.in; abhayk99@gmail.com

Highlights:
A demountable titanium window with metallic sealing has been developed for
industrial accelerators.
Experimental studies have been performed to develop a profile on the flange that
gives the leak tightness after compressing the titanium foil between two aluminum
gaskets.
The development will help in achieving higher life of titanium windows in the high
radiation environment of industrial accelerators together with a higher vacuum as
compared to a fluoroelastomer sealed demountable titanium window.
Keywords: Industrial accelerators, titanium window, metallic sealing.
The energetic electrons must be brought from the vacuum envelope of the
industrial electron accelerators to the atmosphere in order to utilize them for the
irradiation of products. This is achieved through a vacuum barrier of thin foil of titanium
at the end of the scanning chamber due to its high electron transmissibility [1, 2, 3]. In
order to facilitate dis-assembly, the titanium foil is compressed between the fixed flange
of the scanning chamber and a removable flange on the atmospheric side. The sealing
between the face of fixed flange and the titanium foil may be achieved either through
fluoroelastomer O rings or through metallic sealing. This assembly of flanges,
seal/gasket and titanium foil is called a titanium window. The fluoroelastomers suffer
from radiation damage in high radiation fields of industrial accelerators and they also
restrict the ultimate vacuum to 10-7 mbar range due to outgassing and permeation through
the seal material [4]. Replacement of fluoroelastomer O rings and re-evacuation of the
vacuum envelope to the working vacuum level is a time consuming task and results in a
loss of working hours for the commercial facilities. Metallic sealing of the titanium
window is an attractive choice due to immunity of most of the sealing materials
(aluminum and copper) from either activation or radiation damage below 10 MeV of
electron energy. This also helps in improving the vacuum in the accelerator and
enhancing the life of the sputter ion pumps due to lower gas loads.
Metallic sealing can be divided into three categories (i) using a sealing profile
with flat gaskets, a concept similar to knife edge flanges, (ii) using wire seals and (iii)
using spring energized seals. The first two work on the principle of plastic deformation of

the gaskets / wires to block the leakage paths and the second one works on a combination
of elastic resilience provided by the spring and the plastic flow of a soft material like
aluminum on the outer layer of the seal.
Spring energized seals have a definite shape and require high tightening forces in
order to achieve the sealing. The titanium foils are generally 50 micrometer thick and
they may not be able to tolerate the required tightening forces for spring energized seals.
The seals, working of the principle of plastic deformation, appear to be attractive choices
for developing metallic sealing of titanium windows due to the requirement of
comparatively low tightening forces. The placement of wire seals in-situ is a difficult task
due to the requirement of highly skilled personnel to keep the wire in place when the
wire, the titanium foil and the removable flange are put in place and the bolts are
simultaneously tightened. The option of sealing with a sealing profile on the fixed flange
has the advantage of easier assembly as compared to the wire seals. This is the reason;
the knife edge flanges are more popular in vacuum applications as compared to the wire
sealed flanges.
We report the development of a sealing profile on the fixed flange on the vacuum
side based on the experimental observations. It is shown that the developed profile works
with 50 micrometer titanium foil sandwiched between two 0.2 mm thick unalloyed
aluminum gaskets.
Force applied for achieving plastic deformation of gaskets for the purpose of
sealing should be small in order to save the thin titanium foil from rupture. This favors
the use of unalloyed aluminum as gasket material for its low yield stress and a very good
ductility before rupture. The gasket material in contact with the sealing profile on the
fixed flange should plastically flow in order to develop a seal on the contact surfaces.
Secondly, the sealing profile should not have very small radius of curvature similar to
that of the knife edge flanges as they generate contact stresses that are high enough to
shear the gasket material as well as the titanium foil. If a thicker gasket is taken to avoid
the shearing then there is no plastic flow on the gasket surface in contact with the
titanium foil and the leak tightness is not obtained. On the other hand, flat profiles or
near-flat profiles are prone to leakage due to the establishment of an area contact in the
beginning itself which is prone to existence of contiguous leakage paths under the
contact. A line contact that grows into an area contact after the plastic deformation of the
gasket appears to be an ideal solution to the problem. Hence, the minimum possible
radius of curvature that does not shear the gaskets and the titanium foil should be found
out to start meaningful experimentation. As discussed, substantial plastic flow of the
cross section of the gasket material is required to block the leakage paths between the
sealing profile and the gasket as well as the gasket and the titanium foil. This indicates
that the thickness of the gasket should be kept to a minimum value that does not shear
under the sealing profile.

Enlarged view of at X
Figure 1 : The experimental setup
Figure-1 shows the arrangement of the experimental setup. The experimental
setup consisted of two flanges with 60 mm inside diameter and 150 mm outside diameter.
The bottom flange was the one with a flat face and the upper one had the sealing profile.
The upper flange had a pipe with an ISO-KF coupling welded to it for connecting the
hose of the helium leak detector. The flanges were tightened together using 12 numbers
of M8 stainless steel bolts. The entire assembly was made of AISI SS316L stainless steel.
A gasket between the flat faced flange and the titanium foil acts as a cushion for
distributing the forces to save the foil from shearing. The leak detector is attached to the
KF coupling of the top flange. Alcatel helium leak detector (HLD) was used in the
experiments. This HLD gives sensitivity of 1 x 10-10 mbar.litre/sec.
This should be noted that the relation between tightening torque on the flangebolts and applied force on the gasket may vary depending on the coefficient of friction,
the bolt diameter, its thread pitch and the number of bolts. The torque wrenches also have
in-accuracies in the torque rating if they are not calibrated frequently. Therefore,
successful design of the demountable titanium window should have some tolerance
available on the applied tightening torque i.e. an over-tightening should not result in
rupture of the foil or the gasket leading to a large increase in the leak rate. In order to
ascertain the fault-tolerance against the tightening torque, the leak rate was measured
against a step-wise increase in the tightening torque. A fault-tolerant design would show
a monotonically decreasing or stationary leak rate.
We changed the radius of curvature (ROC) of the sealing profile from 2 mm to 4
mm in steps of 0.5 mm and used them for sealing with 0.2 mm thick sheets of unalloyed
aluminum (AA1060).
The tightening torque was increased in steps of 5 N.m and the helium leak rate
measured by spraying the helium gas from outer periphery of the sealing contact (see
enlargement X in figure-1). The gap between the flange faces was measured to estimate
the plastic deformation of the gaskets. The bolts were tightened in a star fashion to
uniformly compress the gaskets.

The leak rates showed a reduction with increased tightening torque with all ROCs
of the sealing profile and the gasket thicknesses of 0.2 mm and 0.4 mm. However, it was
observed that the gaskets were sheared with increasing torque without giving leak
tightness better than 10-6 mbar.litre/sec if the ROCs were less than 4 mm. Hence, the
radius of curvature was fixed at 4 mm for further experiments.
While we were experimenting with 0.2 mm gasket thickness and 4 mm ROC of
the sealing profile; we observed that helium leak rates decreased monotonically and there
was no leak shown on the HLD by spraying helium from the outer periphery of the
sealing contact at ~ 40% - 60% reduction in the gap between the flange faces. This
observation remained even after increasing the bolt tightening torque to twice the value at
which the leak tightness was obtained. However, some observations were intriguing.
When the total compression was more than 70%, it took an extraordinary long time to get
the background levels of helium in the range of 1 x 10-11 mbar.litre/ second in the HLD.
After the experimental setup was opened and the sandwich of gaskets and titanium foil
was taken out for observations, we found that it was impossible to disengage the two
aluminium gaskets and the titanium foil showed wrinkles near the sealing contact circle.
Sometimes, the wrinkles were so large that they could not have happened only due to the
difference between plastic deformation of the foil and adjoining un-deformed foil.
Therefore, we cutout a sector of the sandwich and conducted a metallography
under a metallurgical microscope. Fig-3 shows that metallograph. It can be seen that
titanium foil was sheared and two aluminum gaskets were cold welded with
indistinguishable interface. Shearing of titanium foil produced conditions suitable for the
cold welding of the aluminum surfaces. Cold welding of aluminum is well known under
high contact pressure and large plastic flow [5].

Fig-2: Metallograph showing Ti foil rupture

This metallograph explained the earlier observations. When helium was sprayed
from the outer periphery of the sealing contact, the HLD did not detect the leak due to the
cold welding between the aluminum gaskets. Due to shearing of titanium foil a new leak
path was created but since, we were not spraying helium from the bottom of the titanium
foil, helium was not reaching the newly generated leak path and the HLD was not able to
detect the leak. The wrinkle formation was also due to the rupture of the foil.
This observation was confirmed in another experiment performed after the
metallographic examination. When helium was sprayed on the exposed portion of the
titanium foil from bottom; HLD immediately showed a large leak.

The experimental observations indicated that the increased compression of the

gaskets resulted in monotonic reduction of leak rate which became stationary after a
certain gap between the flange faces was reached. Tightening the bolts after this point led
to unnecessary plastic flow of the aluminum gaskets and later the shearing of the titanium
foil. In a practical world, it would not be a good practice to monitor the gap and then stop
tightening the bolts after the specified gap is reached. As discussed earlier, the design
should be fault-tolerant and the requirements of such accuracies should be avoided. This
can be obtained by making a suitable design modification that can arrest the total
compression to a value at which the leak-tightness of 1 x 10-10 mbar.litre/ second was first
observed.
Therefore, we introduced a stress limiter feature alongside the circular profile as
shown in figure -3. The compression produced by this modification is explained in
figure-4. The value of x was varied between 0.13 and 0.2 which gave the compression
between 40%-70%. We could obtain a leak rate in 10-10 mbar.litre/second with 0.2 mm
aluminum gasket thickness. A 100% increase in the tightening torque after achieving the
leak tightness did not deteriorate the leak-tightness. After dismantling the set-up, it was
found that the titanium foil was not sheared.

Fig-3: The modified profile with a stress limiter feature

The feature allows the plastic flow under the contact but once the necessary
compression for sealing in achieved; it redistributes the stresses over a larger area. This
inhibits further plastic flow; therefore limits the thinning of gaskets as well as the
shearing of the titanium foil.
In order to evaluate the performance of the sealing profile; we did some
experiments with 0.4 mm gasket thickness using the same profile and we could get a leak
rates in 10-9 mbar.litre/second range. This shows that slight modification in the proposed
sealing profile can ensure a leak tightness of 10-10 mbar.litre/second.
The present profile was generated on a CNC lathe machine. Since, the titanium
windows are generally of rectangular shape; the profile can be generated on CNC milling
machine using computer aided manufacturing. We also found that surface finish was not
a constraint and a normal finish of 1.6 micrometer is good enough for the application.
Figure-4 shows the working of the developed profile.

Figure-4: Sealing profile with a stress-limiter feature

REFERENCES

[1] A. J. Berejka, 2009, Prospects and Challenges for the Industrial Use of Electron Beam
Accelerators, Proceedings of International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Research
Applications and Utilization of Accelerators, Vienna, SM/EB-01, available from
http://www-pub.iaea.org .
[2] Seung-Han Kuk, Sung-Myun Kim, Won-Gu Kang and Bumsoo Han, Nikolai K.
Kuksanov, Kwang-Young Jeong, 2011, Journal of the Korean Physical Society,
59(6), pp 3485-88.
[3] M.R. Cleland, 2005, Industrial applications of electron accelerators, CAS - CERN
Accelerator School and KVI: Specialised CAS Course on Small Accelerators, Zeegse,
The Netherlands, pp 383-416.
[4] Dorothy M. Hoffman, Bawa Singh and John H. Thomas III, Editor(s), 1998,
Handbook of Vacuum Science and Technology, Academic Press, San Diego, USA,
pp 463-488.
[5] Abhay Kumar, P Ganesh, Rakesh Kaul, Puspen Mondal, Pragya Tiwari, A K
Srivastava, R K Soni, L M Kukreja, 2013, Titanium-Mediated Tribo-Chemically
Activated Cold Welding of Aluminum, Chemical and Materials Engineering 1(4):116121.

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