More Than Pumps

While pumps are critical to creating the vacuum environment, it must also be contained and measured. To do that, Varian, Inc. manufactures instruments and gauges to control the environment and hardware such as flanges to preserve it. The company also produces leak detectors for monitoring the integrity of the vacuum. Specialized helium mass spectrometer leak detectors locate leaks on vacuum systems that would generate only one bubble every 100 years if tested under water!

Varian, Inc.’s Vacuum Technologies business segment revenues for fiscal year 2003 were $117 million, a 5% increase over fiscal year 2002 revenues. During the last 2-3 years, this business segment suffered from the global downturn in capital equipment spending. Toward the end of 2003, the company began to see some increase in demand. The drive for clean environments for new processes and analyses continues to fuel new applications for vacuum. For example, massive linear accelerators are being used as super X-ray crystallography systems to analyze proteins.