3. Reciprocating pumps

3.1 Piston pumps

• The ancestor of all vacuum pumps, the suction and pressure pump is sufficiently well known for us not to repeat it here. The result of three centuries of successive improvements, these machines are renowned for their robustness and simplicity of construction. Unfortunately, they are hardly ever built any more.

  The dead volume, at top dead center, is the cause of the limit pressure limitation accessible by piston pumps. For a single-stage pump, this value is 10 ³ ...