Cryogenic processor unit developed by Ed Busch; physisorption
Tuesday, 23. October 2007, 18:09:29
A Cryogenic processor is a unit designed to reach ultra-low temperatures (usually around -300°F / -150°C) at a slow rate in order to prevent thermal shock to the components being treated. The first commercial unit was developed by Ed Busch in the late 1960s. The development of programmable microprocessor controls allowed the machines to follow temperature profiles that greatly increased the effectiveness of the process. Some manufacturers make
cryoprocessorswith home computers to define the temperature profile. The reliability of these computers in an industrial environment is greatly in doubt.
A special type of adsorption is physisorption. The difference between physisorption and chemisorption is that the adsorbed molecule is tied up with the substrate by physical forces, defined here as forces which doesn’t cause chemical bonds. Such interactions are mostly unfocused in contrast to chemical bonds.
With a background in the heat treating industry, Busch founded a company in Detroit called CryoTech in 1966. Though CryoTech later merged with 300 Below to create the largest and oldest commercial cryogenics company in the world, they originally experimented with the possibility of increasing the life of metal tools to anywhere between 200%-400% of the original life expectancy using cryogenic tempering instead of heat treating. This evolved in the late 1990s into the treatment of other parts (that did more than just increase the life of a product) such as musical instruments or amplifier valves (improved sound quality), brass instruments (improved tonal characteristics), baseball bats (greater sweet spot), golf clubs (greater sweet spot), racing engines (greater performance under stress), firearms (less warping after continuous shooting), knives, razor blades, brake rotors and even pantyhose. The theory was based on how heat-treating metal works (the temperatures are lowered to room temperature from a high degree causing certain strength increases in the molecular structure to occur) and supposed that continuing the descent would allow for further strength increases. Using liquid nitrogen, CryoTech formulated the first early version of the cryogenic processor. Unfortunately for the newly-born industry, the results were unstable, as components sometimes experienced thermal shock when they were cooled too fast. Some components in early tests even shattered because of the ultra-low temperatures. In the late twentieth century, the field improved significantly with the rise of applied research, which coupled microprocessor based industrial controls to the cryogenic processor in order to create more stable results.







