Installation

JEOL JEM 1400plus Installation

The JEOL JEM 1400plus was installed in the Myers Hall EMC area starting the second week of January, 2017. It all started with a large delivery truck and a rigging crew at the Chemistry Department loading dock. Over the course of several hours, the rigging crew, a truck driver, the engineer (Dave Dillner) and members of the EMC moved about 30 boxes along the hallways and through the tunnel into Myers Hall. The trip through Chemistry and Simon Hall also involved two elevator rides and a couple of downhill then uphill slopes.

By early afternoon, Dave had arranged most of the boxes along the corridor wall in Myers and had gotten the column situated in its new home with the help of the riggers.

By the end of the day, Dave had opened most of the boxes and we had moved most of the parts into the same room as the column. We even found the official packing list in the second-to-last box that we opened.

Even as soon as the next day, the 1400plus was beginning to take shape.

There were lots of changes on the next day, including the installation of the panel for the chilled water in the corner of the room (just to the left of the column) and the connection of some water lines to it, and the change in location of one of the electrical boxes (also to the left of the column).

By the 4th day, all the water lines were connected, the Haskris water chiller was ready to power on and the main computer was ready to connect.

On day 5, Dave turned on the Haskris water chiller and was ready to power on parts of the 1400plus. However, the water in the chilled water lines looked dirty (it had been circulating through the JEOL JSM 5800LV for ages and then sat unmoving in the lines for a month after the SEM was decommissioned) and he decided to flush the water lines a time or two before putting any of the chilled water through the new microscope.

We also set in place a time-lapse camera (with the gracious help of Prof. Roger Hangarter) to monitor the assembly of the 1400plus from this point onwards. It turned out that the really major changes to the room and the instrument had already happened and there was not enough change to make it worthwhile for Roger to process the images from the camera. According to Roger, that's one of the issues with all time-lapse work: one can't tell whether it was worth the effort until it's all over.

After flushing the chilled water lines and re-filling the Haskris water chiller several times, Dave powered up the 1400plus for the first time. He needed to connect various vacuum gauges in order to keep the system running continuously, and once that was done, he attached the electron gun to the top of the column and pumped down the entire microscope. He also ran the high tension cable between the gun and the HT tank (which sits directly behind the column in this instrument).

By this time, the boxes in the hall had been emptied and removed and even most of the parts had been attached to the 1400plus. The 1400plus does have a surprisingly large number of side panels and covers that will eventually have to be attached. The image to the right shows them all leaning against the wall outside the Myers Hall EM area, and they actually form a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle for Dave to assemble.

The major visible changes to the 1400plus over the next few days were attaching some of these side panels to the instrument and the addition of the second monitor. We will eventually have a third monitor (i.e., a monitor for the actual TEM, for the Gatan camera and for the Oxford EDX system) that will likely sit above the two shown here,

This image is just a few days later and there are really no significant visible changes to the 1400plus. Starting today, the engineer (Mike Van Etten was here this week) labored to make the microscope run properly: testing the vacuum, raising the high tension to operating voltages (80 to 120 kV), heating up the filament and finding and aligning the beam. In the image below, it's possible to see for the first time that the 1400plus is actually running: the smaller monitor is actively running JEOL's TEM Center.

With the 1400plus performing well at the end of Mike's visit, it was time for Stephan Bourgoin from Gatan to get the OneView camera working. He and Dave Dillner switched the positions of the two monitors (so that the camera control was closest to the operator), and started up the (rather noisy) Gatan PC. A few more side panels had also been attached by then, and the desk at the left holds specimen loading tools for the first time.

The last thing to be added was the EDX system The image below was acquired several weeks after the EDX system was added and shows the detector extending from the right side of the 1400plus's column (just above the large monitor connected to the Gatan OneView camera). It also shows the third monitor (the one furthest to the right) that is connected to the EDX detector. Close-up images of the detector are shown below.

The images below show the 1400plus from the back. The two images were acquired 12 days apart and show the instrument just before the electron gun was attached (left) and after everything except the EDX system had been attached (right). From this vantage point, it is easy to see the large number of side panels and covers that needed to be attached to the instrument.

This pair of images are close-ups of the EDX detector attached to the right-hand side of the 1400plus's column (as viewed from the operator's seat). The image at the left shows the detector in the retracted position (i.e., the detector is pulled away from the specimen) while the image at the right shows the detector in the inserted position. Insertion and retraction are automated in this system whereas the current system on the JEOL JEM 3200FS uses manual insertion and retraction. An additional difference is that the system on the 3200FS is cooled using liquid nitrogen (and has a large dewar connected to it) while this system is Peltier cooled and doesn't need a dewar. Cooling is fairly rapid, but it is still recommended to leave the detector cold even when it is not in use.

Installation

JEOL JEM 1400plus Installation

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