ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Turbomolecular pump

Hey kiddo! Have you ever blown up a balloon? Remember how you had to inflate it by blowing lots of air into it? Well, imagine that you want to do the same thing, but instead of a balloon you have a vacuum chamber where there is no air at all. How can you put air back into there?

This is where a turbomolecular pump comes in! It's kind of like a giant vacuum cleaner, but instead of sucking dirt and dust, it sucks gas molecules out of a vacuum chamber. You see, even though we think of space as empty, it's actually full of little particles called gas molecules that are too small for us to see. These particles can create pressure, which makes it hard to create a vacuum, or a space with no air.

The turbomolecular pump works by using a series of blades that spin very fast inside the pump. When the blades spin, they create a kind of suction effect that pulls in gas molecules through an inlet port. As the gas molecules enter the pump, they are trapped by a series of rotating blades that spin even faster than the first ones. These blades work like a fan, pushing the gas molecules towards the outlet port, which leads to a different part of the vacuum chamber or to the outside world.

The pump keeps spinning the blades faster and faster, until the gas molecules are compressed tightly and pushed out of the pump with enough force to create a vacuum. In other words, the turbomolecular pump creates a strong vacuum by sucking out gas molecules from a space and compressing them so much that they are expelled out of the pump. The end result is a space with almost no gas molecules, otherwise known as a vacuum.

It's pretty cool, right? The turbomolecular pump might look like a complicated machine, but it's actually just like a giant vacuum cleaner, spinning blades really fast to suck up gas molecules and create a vacuum.