A vacuum system with two oil diffusion pumps connected in series was constructed for obtaining the experimental data about the back-diffusion. These two pumps were of the same type, and the one was used as a main pump and the other was, so to speak, used as a booster pump to supply the main pump with the good fore vacuum. Several kinds of known gases such as hydrogen, helium, etc. were leaked separately into the fore vacuum side of the main pump, and the masses in the high vacuum side under these conditions were investigated by the omegatron type mass spectrometer.
In the case of light masses, such as hydrogen or helium, the pressure ratio of the fore vacuum side to the high vacuum side was about 10
3, and this ratio increased to about 10
5 in the case of neon (mass 20). In the case of nitrogen, however, the back-diffusion was not found on account of the great enhancement of the pressure ratio to the order of more than 10
7.
The behavior of the backstreaming of oil vapor was also investigated by the omegatron, and this observation implies that the oil vapor flowing through a channel is not able to be treated as a steady flow, but it has to be treated as a unsteady flow having the tendency to penetrate into the channel gradually.
The speed of the penetration, considered through this observation, seems to be very slow, and for this reason, it is able to occur very often that the partial pressure due to oil vapor, in a vacuum chamber apart from the pump, is kept lower than the vapor pressure of it for several months.
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