Taper-seal type metal sealing system and available applications

A conventional disk (flat ring) gasket for ConFlat(R) sealing system has been commonly applied to commercially available equipments for ultrahigh vacuum systems. However, its large redundant part which wastes the tightening force makes its handling and seal reliability problematic. We examine a taper-seal type gasket, which is newly designed to improve the inefficiency of ConFlat mechanism using conventional disk gaskets. It is remarked that the obtained seal area on a taper-seal type gasket is 1.6 similar to 3.7 times larger than that of a conventional disk gasket. Our numencal results on stress distributions in a tightened gasket indicate that taper-seal gasket realizes highly stable seal pressure even under a lower tightening torque. High sealing reliability is thus achieved as expected which is mainly due to the wide seal area and stable seal pressure realized even for rather hard gasket material. Taper-seal type gasket also has some practical advantages. The most important of them may be that it enables to construct new edgeless metal sealing systems without a welded heavy flange. Here, edgeless sealing systems are composed of highly flexible incorporating viewports, bellows, feedthroughs, and blank-off covers, as well as any other conventional vacuum components. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.