I made an enclosure for the tube furnace and hooked it up to an arduino and solid state relay. The main body of the furnace is 5″x5″x12″ and filled with alumina ceramic wool. Impressively, the exterior only reaches 100°-200°C at most even while the tube inside is over 1000°C! That should keep the furnace from being a severe fire or burn hazard. Now I just need to write a PID loop with a proper temperature ramp controller and I should be good to go!
4 replies on “Tube Furnace”
Nick, Great project and video! Guessing you’re a fan of Ben Krasnow’s videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/bkraz333/videos since you have a similar method of explaining things succinctly, but with enough detail to be clear.
well i really don’t know how i came across your video of tube furnace , thank god to youtube algorithm. Well , I have seen videos of sam zeloof fabricating entire chip on his garage but you did splendid job creating a tube furnace really man we need an electronic society with people like you guys . why not electron microscope next time, just kidding. I am from small country nepal which lies between india and china and i am electronics undergrad student and i am trying to design a processor for scientific calculator , most basic . may be after i complete undergrad which i will complete by 2025 , I would want to build entire lithography machine which can create chip of nanometre scale. people like you really inspire me , you got a new fan
Can I convince you to take some data points now that your furnace is done? If you monitor power usage and temperature during ramp-up and various operations, you could calculate the steady-state loss of the furnace (the power required to maintain the element), which could drive improvements in insulation. If you’re only trying to heat things radiatively, could you put them into the furnace in a quartz boat/tube, which may heat up less than tongs.
Also, would love to see some thermal imaging!
Hi,
I made a comment on your youtube channel but I don’t see it anymore so I thought I’d try here as well. I am working on a student-built educational open source semiconductor fab at Carnegie Mellon. In our first semester we spent about $70k buying equipment but our goal is to bring the cost down by DIY’ing tools. So far we’ve made a maskless lithography stepper, a spin coater, and we’re currently working on a thermal evaporator. We got a tube furnace for free but new it costs $5k, so we’d like to link to your project instead. We’d also love to collaborate in future projects! We’re in the process of building out Gitbook, which will be our main written documentation platform. Our long term goal is to build a huge collaborative open source semiconductor fab project.
Best,
Elio