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during over night continous exposures, is there an option to empty buffer (tank)?

Added by Anonymous almost 13 years ago

Hi,

I had two times problem of aquitisition and high tension off during overnight automated aquistion for about 15hours. Our engineer said that it is the cause of not doing empty of buffer tank for every six to eight hours run. I need to monitor the TEM parameters either the Pen3 or valve V1 inorder to do that. If there will not be any conflicts,his suggestion is to use MoniTEM software to monitor parameters and get SMS of abnormolities.

But I am curious a bit, may be it is included in Leginon or is there a special way(if you had the same problem) to do that which you follow in Scripps. Though may be this problem is not much related, please give a suggestion.

regards,
venkata


Replies (3)

RE: during over night continous exposures, is there an option to empty buffer (tank)? - Added by Anchi Cheng almost 13 years ago

Our F20 and T12 empties buffer tank automatically, probably by monitoring P3. This has always been in place since their installation, and presumably a standard feature on these FEI microscope for those using film since the moisture from film will require buffer tank to be emptied often. I don't know if it is done through MoniTEM software. If this is not an automatic event on your scope, and your P3 tend to be high, activate this does seems to be a reasonable solution.

None of our microscopes has film in there by default any more. Only when a user requires film specifically, it will be put in the scope. On F20 that never had film, P3 rarely get to low enough vacuum to trigger that pumping process (our values typically are 30-40) and our IGP1 (column) is typically below 10 once the cryo-stage is stabilized unless there are problems with the seal between cryo-holder and goniometer. On worst days, this goes up to range of 20, we would be rather worry and have them serviced. At these levels, HT will certainly not shut off. I think IGP1 need to be more than 35 before HT shut-off to be triggered.

Leginon does not have a general feature to trigger the emptying of buffer tank. Such automatic trigger is only an option in MSI-Tomography, and it is done before the tilt series is started. It is possible to add features like this if there is enough demand. We have a base class for doing this kind of timed operation.

Anchi

RE: during over night continous exposures, is there an option to empty buffer (tank)? - Added by Anchi Cheng almost 13 years ago

By the way, the standard MSI applications you use for Leginon, do not monitor vacuum. It is unlikely to have conflict with MoniTEM unless MoniTEM blocks others from using TEM Scripting.

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