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Hi together,

Just wanted to share my experience with adding a water-cooler to a Trius SX-694 detector. We require a liquid cooler as we operate our spectrograph in a thermally controlled and double insulated enclosure to suppress temperature induced instabilities. The Trius CCD with Sony ICX694-ALG chip is in-particular interesting for spectroscopy due to its high QE (around 77%) and low thermal noise (0.003 e/s/pix at -10 degree Celsius). We purchased this camera almost two years ago and the only vendors who integrated the Sony chip were Atik, SX and FLI. I did a bit of thinking how this camera can be operated with a water-cooler without changing too much or modifying the detector enclosure. Attached you will see some pictures of the parts and the complete assembly.

The whole system consists of five parts: a ring shaped cooling head, two fittings for standard vinyl tubing, a lid and a modified barrel that encloses the electronics. The aluminium version is glued (after several stages of cleaning) with special glue for metals. A previous version which I made from copper (pieces are soldered together) is running since December 2014 inside the spectrograph enclosure, but was too expensive for replication. The cooling head can be operated with a CPU liquid cooling system or recirculating chiller.

Also I included a screen shot of the actual cooling performance (48-50 K below ambient) achieved with the water-cooler. In this test the spectrograph environment was stabilized to about 25.5 degree Celsius and the coolant setpoint was 22 degree Celsius.

Cheers

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