Abstract
This simulation effort is of a high-speed fragment impacting a housing wall in order to predict if the housing material and configuration are capable of stopping the fragment. This application involves a turbine style high-vacuum pump, known as a turbomolecular pump, that produces a high-vacuum atmosphere within a given volume that it is connected to. The basic design of the turbomolecular pump has a motor turned rotor with several turbine blades attached to it, and that spins at high rotational speeds, up to 60,000 revolutions per minute. The turbine blades are configured on the rotor to impact and move gas molecules axially through the pump and eventually to an exhaust location. In order to achieve a high pumping speed, the rotor needs to turn at very high rotational speeds. A turbine blade failure, therefore, can throw high-speed fragments against the turbine pump housing, and potentially breach the housing. The safety design objective is to keep all debris captured within the turbine pump housing as the pump rotor spins down from the blade failure event. The dynamic properties of the materials of construction are applied, along with the pertinent initial and boundary conditions to create a simulation model that predicts the results of this high-speed fragment impact case.
