Backstreaming of Impurity Gas Through a Leak in Pressurized Vessel

The presence of a leak in a vessel containing pure gas can induce the contamination by atmospheric gas diffusing into the vessel. In order to avoid this, a gas which has to be kept pure also in presen ce of a leak is usually pressurized, to reduce the flow of contaminating gas through the leak owing to the molecular drag by the outstreaming pure gas. In this paper, a simple model calculation of ba ckstreaming based on the solution of the diffusion + drag equation in cylindrical coordinates is presented. It is shown that both the pressure difference and the dimension of the leak are critical in determining the contaminating flow, a maximum in the backstreaming flow appearing when the drag velocity of the outstreaming gas equals the diffusion velocity.