[labnetwork] Liquid nitrogen and argon shortage

[Manish Keswani]

Thank you all for your responses and offering great ideas. One of our major nitrogen suppliers indicated on Friday that they will not be able to supply nitrogen at the same capacity as before (delivery being prioritize for hospitals and health services) for the next two months. 

We will be looking into the following items in the next couple of days to reduce consumption of nitrogen or supplement it through other sources.

1. Determine N2. consumption  for various tools and pumps. If you have this information for your facility, please share as we can use it as a starting point for our facility. 

2.  Make specific tools (that have high N2 consumption) available on certain days in the week for the users and  shut them down on other days.

3. Switch to CDA for pump purging, load locks, chamber venting, wet benches, etc wherever possible. Factors be be considered are dew point of CDA, gases used in the tool (flammable, corrosive etc)

4. Install N2 saving kit. Please provide additional information if you already have this installed in your facility.

5. Identify leaks

6. Near term or long term: Look into N2 generators (rental and/or purchase)

Thank you all,
Manish

Sent from my iPhone

> On Dec 3, 2021, at 5:24 PM, Manish Keswani <manish.keswani01 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello everyone,
> 
> We just learned that there is a severe shortage of liquid nitrogen and argon in the US. Our entire lab will be impacted by this and we will need to evaluate consumption of these gases for different tools in our Nano fabrication center and make priority for tools usage based on that. Nitrogen is used as a purge gas for pumps and equipment and we will be looking into tools that consume significant amount of nitrogen and how to minimize their use or use them more efficiently.
> 
> If you have any thoughts or ideas that will help with this issue, please share them.
> 
> Thanks,
> Manish
> 
> Sent from my iPhone