With its compact design, the Tube Sealing Equipment TSE serves as a simple vacuum line to crack ampoules, split samples into several ampoules or to prepare and seal samples for combustion in quartz tubes. TSE is also a convenient and versatile instrument for ¹⁴C preparation laboratories without their own AMS capability. Gas ampoules prepared by TSE can be stored and shipped for later analysis with GIS and vacuum-sealed graphite cathodes can be shipped and stored indefinitely.

TSE is manually operated and equipped with two 9 mm Ultra-Torr® ports for sealing of combustion tubes, two 4 mm ports for sealing of quartz and glass tubes and one ½” Ultra-Torr® port with a bellows tube cracker for 9 mm sample tubes. The vacuum line also comprises two calibrated volumes (corresponding to 700 and 2’100 μg carbon as CO₂ at 1 bar), two pressure transducers (0–3’000 mbar) with digital readouts and a Peltier cooler for water removal.