UC Irvine

Mechanical vacuum pumps are widely used to realize low vacuum environments and are commonly set to operate continuously to maintain a certain standby pressure in vacuum systems. Huge electric power consumption during the standby state could be observed. This thesis presented a method by implementing a mode-switch mechanism to the pump that could achieve 80% standby power saving. This mechanism allows the pump to switch between its normal work mode and a sleep mode, which would shut off the pump’s power supply and let the pressure inside the vacuum chamber increase to a threshold above its standby pressure. Once the threshold is reached, the work mode would restore the power supply and pump down the chamber to its standby pressure. A detection module was developed to suspend the mode switching when users are operation the tool. The power-saving results and impacts of sleep mode with different threshold pressure were analyzed in this thesis.