4 isosceles right trangles

[cathead]

The Balzers-made unit your magnets came from was a ionization type vacuum gauge. The parts exposed to vacuum probably are stainless steel. Don't know if you got that part of the gauge or not -- the actual sensor is replaceable, what your photo shows is the body that has the magnets and electronics.

And yes, when new they are expensive. The consumable part of the gauge alone costs about $150....

A friend of mine picked up several of these units at a dumpster somewhere in Arizona as well as some other larger electronics boxes by Balzer.
He knows I do a lot of electronics work and thought I might be able to use some of this equipment. Yes, the vacuum parts look like stainless steel
but I am not able to find a use for such specialized stainless steel parts. I'm basically scrapping this stuff out and using what I can use before
it goes to recycling. I have one unit that has a fan assembly like a tiny jet engine that sends information on pressure or flow or something like that
to likely a computer.

 

[homebrewed]

The jet-engine like thing could be a special type of high vacuum pump, called a turbo pump. They can spin up to 100KRPM's, depending on the size. They usually have a brushless DC motor inside, and the better ones have maglev bearings so you likely could get more magnets out of that. Some use special high-speed bearings but they don't last as long as maglev types.

Due to their high operating speed they can't pump against atmospheric pressure -- the blades would burn up or break under the aerodynamic load. They need a backing pump (sometimes called a roughing pump) to get the pressure down low enough for them to work. Backing pumps are mechanical in nature and aren't able to get down to super-low pressure by themselves.

Turbo pumps are used in scientific equipment like scanning electron microscopes, thin-film deposition systems and the like. They can fail catastrophically (read: blow up) if subjected to a sudden vacuum breach, or if a hunk of something falls into the spinning blades. The housing is designed to _try_ to restrict the damage to just the pump. However, since the inlet side of the pump must connect to a vacuum chamber, whatever is in the chamber likely is toast, as well.

That would have been an interesting dumpster to comb through!