Welcome to AP Tech’s Tech Talk blog! The Tech Talk blog is our newest source for expert advice and updated news about AP Tech and the world of high purity gas system components.

In our future posts, we will advise best practices for the most challenging applications as well as other company news, events, and information.

The biggest news of 2020 remains COVID-19. With local changes in infection rates throughout the year, we are often asked for factory updates. You can find our latest COVID-19 updates here on our homepage. AP Tech and our suppliers are doing our best to protect our workers and maintain product flow to our customers. While our standard lead times remain 10-12 weeks, more than 90% of our shipments are currently on time. Our ability to expedite when possible has also improved.

Regarding COVID-19, due to social distancing requirements, we have not hosted factory tours or source inspections for many months, so we decided to create a virtual factory tour. The virtual factory tour only takes a few minutes, and unlike the real AP Tech factory tour, we will take you inside our clean rooms. The virtual factory tour takes you throughout the factory from our offices, to incoming inspection and into our stock room. We show you how we maintain product traceability throughout the assembly and test process. You will see how we clean, weld, assemble and test our valve and regulator products. You can find the factory tour on our homepage.

We also released new training videos. In the new training videos, we offer in depth regulator and valve basic training. There is a lot of practical information regarding common failure modes, configuring parts and expert technical advice such as recommended leak detection methods. As always, these trainings are about concepts related to gas handling and not a sales pitch. The videos can be seen here. We will continue to add new training videos regularly, so check back again to see updated topics.

In addition to the new features of our website, don’t forget all the great existing tools and resources available.

The Tech Briefs section features “Product Notes”. This section offers a wide range of information about AP Tech products and applications from high temperature valve options, sizing vacuum generator exhaust piping, best practices for countering Joules-Thomson cooling effect on source regulators, and many other topics. Future BLOG posts will highlight many of the product notes’ topics.

The “Tools” section of the website has tools to properly size our products.  The gas flow calculator can be used to determine Cv, flow and pressure drop of our valves with the most common specialty gases used in semiconductor and related manufacturing.  We also have a downloadable catalog of regulator flow curves by product, a regulator valve and selection guide, and flow trip point calculator for our flow switches.

In addition, there are many other resources available on the website that we will highlight in future BLOG posts.

Lastly, quality and service are part of AP Tech’s DNA. A large part of our service culture is live factory trained support people.  We are available to support you via phone or video conferencing.  If you have any questions, need technical support, live expert product training, or need factory updates, please don’t hesitate to ask. We strive for 4 hour response for questions during business hours and one day response for non-business hours. Throughout COVID-19 we continue to provide fully staffed customer support resources and capabilities.