FEI Talos F200i S/TEM: system recovery after water outage

It's not always sunshine and rainbows, my fellow electron microscopy aficionados. State-of-the art S/TEMs are very complicated instruments and rely on a highly sophisticated "life support" system to operate. One important aspect of that system is the cooling water, which must flow uninterrupted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year (plus the extra day on leap years).
That being said, it's not completely out of the question that at some point (for factors often completely outside your control) the cooling water will suddenly and unexpectedly become interrupted, triggering certain interlocks in the S/TEM to prevent permanent system damage. In the case of our Talos F200i S/TEM, the optics and cooling to the Ceta camera will instantly shut off, otherwise preventing damage to the optics and the Ceta camera.
So, after this happens, what do you need to do to get the system back to operational status? Please stay tuned to find out!
Thank you for your support, my fellow electron microscopy aficionados! Please like, subscribe, and share and leave any questions or comments you may have and I will do my best to reply as soon as possible. Video topic requests are always welcome and appreciated; I enjoy making these videos and wish I could make them more frequently, but the demands of my job make it tough to do so; I’m in charge of 3 S/TEMs, 2 dual FIB/SEM systems, and 1 SEM and this keeps me very busy!
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[@praveensahu6639]

Hi Nicholas...thank you so much for putting these wonderful demo videos...
My humble request...can you give us demo about creating Alignment file and Feg registry?

[@NicholasRudawski]

Hi Praveen: good to hear from you and thank you for supporting my channel; I'm very glad to hear my videos are helping you. Regarding setting up a FEG register, I already have an older video about this that you may find below (though I am considering possibility recording an updated version):
th-cam.com/video/WXyJkH46J9o/w-d-xo.html&pp=ygUNRkVHIHJlZ2lzdGVycw%3D%3D
As far as setting up an alignment file, it can take literally an entire day to set up an alignment file for one S/TEM at one high tension; I don't think there would be much interest in an 8+ hour video of me setting up an alignment file (ha ha). However, what could be useful is to go through the individual parts of the alignment file and make each "segment" its own video, since this will usually be somewhere from 30 - 60 min in length. Once all the segments are recorded, I could put them together into a master "playlist" on setting up an alignment file. I could also do the same thing with calibrations. Too be sure, it would definitely be a rather involved project, but also one that would be very helpful to many people, so thank you for the suggestion!

[@praveensahu6639]

@@NicholasRudawski Thanks..will be waiting for this playlist

[@deepak.dinkar]

Good that you recorded!

[@NicholasRudawski]

Yes! I was about to start doing everything and then I realized, this would be potentially useful to document.

[@jijunzhang9168]

Hi Nicholas, thanks very much for your nice video! What does CSU mean?

[@NicholasRudawski]

You're welcome; I know the "SU" stands for "supply unit", but I'm not sure about the "C"; I think it either stands for "camera" or "controller".

[@rahulagrawal6026]

Hello Nicholas. Ceta cooling in Themis becomes active automatically within 20-30 min. We had frequent such optic board errors in summer of 2020-2021.

[@NicholasRudawski]

I will freely admit I haven't ever accurately timed the time for the Ceta camera to go from warmed to RT to fully cooled and "stable"; I feel that this easily takes most of 45 min, but I could be overestimating. Are you saying that your Ceta camera cooling automatically restarts after restoring a water outage without having to do anything? If so, can you please point me to the setting I can adjust to activate this on our systems here? Many thanks.

[@rahulagrawal6026]

Hi ​@@NicholasRudawski. It is the setting our service engineer did at the time of installation. As a user I do not know. Sorry.

[@NicholasRudawski]

@@rahulagrawal6026 no worries, I will see what I can learn from our service technician about this; that being said, just looking through the Ceta service tool, there isn't anything that jumps out at me as being a setting to perform automatic cooling recovery.

[@farzaadkhaan]

Hi Nocholas, is there any way to put the machine in a "safer" mode? For example when you expect something. In my TFS/FEI machines I turn off my cameras first and the acceleration in the next level (but I keep feg on) but it could be nice if we could turn off the low voltage too (like JEOLs).

[@NicholasRudawski]

Yes, you are absolutely correct; if we know ahead of time of a pending water outage (or power outage) there is a proper "idling" state or "power down" state to reduce stress on the system as opposed to just triggering interlocks when the water suddenly stops flowing. With the water, this doesn't really affect the FEG/HT, this is mainly an issue with the optics, the cameras, and any GIF that may be present (no GIF is present on the S/TEM in the video; otherwise, I would have shown how to do the reboot for that, too).

[@farzaadkhaan]

@@NicholasRudawski Hi Nicholas. Actually it was a question not a comment on your nice video 😅 as a lab manager I am curious to know what kind of actions you take when there is a planned outage or when you want to leave a system unattended for e.g. New Year holidays. Do you for example turn off the low voltage power supplies? That kind of experience would be very useful for us.🙏🙏

[@NicholasRudawski]

@@farzaadkhaan oh OK, so what to do when we have a "planned" outage? Well, it's very situation dependent on the nature of the outage. If it is a water outage, we could preemptively warm up the cameras and the GIF (if present), so the cooling isn't shut off abruptly. Aside from that, we don't really need to shut off anything else; the lenses automatically turn off once the water flow is cut, but this doesn't affect the vacuum system, the high tension, or the FEG tip, so we just leave those on because it is better to keep those powered up unless it is absolutely necessary to power those down. If there is a different scenario of interest for consideration, please send me an email and I I will comment. Rest assured though, if we have to do another type of "recovery" video, I will be sure to record it again.