Investigation of an extractor gauge modified by carbon nanotubes emitter grown on stainless steel substrate

• A novel CNT emitter based gauge has been developed with a good linear characteristic ranging from 1.0 × 10−8 Pa to 5.0 × 10−4 Pa.
• The CNTs grown on the stainless steel exhibit excellent field emission characters.
• The gauge performances were optimized by simulation and experiment methods.

This paper presents an investigation of carbon nanotube (CNT) emitter-based ionization gauge. The metrological performances of this CNT emitter-based ionization gauge were investigated and studied by numerical and experimental methods. The electron source was constructed with multi-wall nanotubes (MWNT), which were grown on stainless steel substrate using thermal chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technique. The influence of anode and reflector voltages on the anode current Ia and ion current I+ were studied in this work, respectively. The electron transmittance increases significantly along with the increase of anode voltage, and I+ increases dramatically as the increase of reflector voltage from 0 V to 525 V, but it decreases again with the further increase of reflector voltage to 600 V. The studied gauge with CNT cathode has good measurement linearity from 1.0 × 10−8 Pa to 5.0 × 10−4 Pa and a gauge sensitivity of 0.03 Pa−1 for argon is achieved.