The ware for July 2006 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.
I was walking around Halted Specialties about a week ago before my talk at the National Youth Leadership Forum. Halted Specialties is one of my favorite places to go and kill an hour when I’m in between meetings in silicon valley, lots of neat wares to look at and learn from. I saw this gem on the shelf and I had to buy it–I had heard of these, but never seen one of these in real life before. Honestly, I don’t know exactly what this does or what it was used for, but I do recognize that this is a very special kind of logic. To see this, check out the “wiring” that it uses:
I am looking forward to people’s guesses on this one!
The Clippard valves tell me that it’s some kind of pneumatic control assembly. I’m not sure whether the channels are supposed to contain air, or some type of hydraulic fluid.
I could see something like this being used in fields as diverse as aquariums and PCB manufacturing. The fact that you found it at a surplus place in the Bay Area argues for the latter…. but I think it’ll take someone familiar with this particular tech to give you a positive ID. Teh Google, it does (almost) nothing!
I work in the semiconductor manufacturing industry and some equipment that I work on uses something very similar to this. Is is a pneumatic interlock block – at least that is what we call it… What it does is prevent the flow of gases that could react with each other in the chamber causing an explosion or other bad results.
So if Silane (a pyrophoric) were flowing in the chamber this would not allow an oxidizer to flow at the same time and vice-versa.
Typically you have a pneumatic solenoid valve bank which controls the pneumatic valves which allow the gases to flow. This block goes inbetween them so that even if you were to manually override the solenoid, the CDA pressure would not be passed along to the pneumatic valves, which will not open and therefore no fireworks.
If I remember correctly they make these in layers, routing out the channels from lexan, and then bonding them together.
I didn’t see any part #’s specific to my company, so I’m not sure exactly what it came from, but that is what we use them for…
Whatever it is, I’d say it’s broken =)
Look at the bottom edge!
Julian Calaby
Small world: my first thought on seeing the picture (and before reading the text) was “That valve assembly that I’ve seen at Halted in the back left near-ish the motors and switches”.
All the fluid flow channels on the bottom remind me of the analog flow “circuitry” in an automatic transmission. A guy here in Los Alamos once made a simple fluid calculator that used fluid flow to induce vaccums at certain points and used this pressure to drive a mechanical computer of sorts. It was made of lexan and looked a lot like this, though it didn’t have the big valves on it.
Pneumatic logic board powered by air.
So you’re the one who bought it! I stared at that thing every time I went to Halted for about the past year or so. It reminds me vaguely of the fluid logic board I saw which was used to control a safety system for a nuclear power plant.
I did some checking and the block that my company uses is made by Bay Advanced Technologies. I’ll link to some pics later tonight…
http://cgi.ebay.com/Clippard-Pneumatic-Logic-Circuit-R355-R311_W0QQitemZ7610855255QQcategoryZ45044QQcmdZViewItem
Clippard pineumatic logic circuit ;o)
Very interesting piece of gear!!! :oD
Greetings from Brazil,
Alexandre Souza
Oh my god, I wrote Pineumatic!!! It is pneumatic ;o) ooooops! :o(
Po, como tu descobriu ?
If I say it now I’ll spoil the fun ;o) Lets Bunnie announce the winner and I’ll tell the details ;o)
This+is+very+interesting
whatever you do do not use this for routing flamable gasses like homie up top seems to think! Those are clippard modular valves which are very cool and ultra flexible but NOT intrinsically safe. You can run a bunch of your pnematic devices at once and Im sure do all kinds of other practical things with what looks to be a series of four-way valves but blowing things up, to my mind anyway, is not a very practical affair.
A SUPPORTED BY THE DEVELOPER TOOLS? It was interesting. You seem very knowledgeable in ypour field.