Conversion from Cubic centimeters per minute to US Gallons per second

Information about the Cubic centimeter per minute (cm³/min)

The cubic centimetre per minute is a unit of volumetric flow rate equal to one cubic centimetre passing a point every minute. Its symbol is cm³/min, and since a cubic centimetre is a millilitre, mL/min means the same thing. It is the standard unit of controlled gas flow in laboratories and in the semiconductor industry.

That industry gave it an abbreviation of its own: sccm, standard cubic centimetres per minute. The word standard matters, because a gas expands and contracts with temperature and pressure, so a volume flow means nothing until the conditions are pinned down. A mass flow controller set to 50 sccm delivers a fixed number of molecules per minute regardless of what the downstream pressure does, which is precisely what a deposition or etching process requires.

A silicon wafer passing through a plasma etcher meets several such controllers at once — argon at a few hundred sccm, a reactive fluorine compound at tens, oxygen at a handful — and the recipe that defines the process is essentially a list of these numbers against time. Repeating a process in another factory means reproducing the same flows.

Chromatography and gas analysis use the unit at the low end. Helium carrier gas through a capillary column runs at one or two cubic centimetres per minute, a flame detector burns hydrogen at thirty and air at three hundred, and a mass spectrometer's inlet is designed around a flow the vacuum pumps can cope with.

Liquids appear here as well, particularly in analytical chemistry and medicine. A high-performance liquid chromatography pump runs at 0.2 to 2 cubic centimetres per minute, and an intravenous infusion of 100 millilitres over an hour is 1.67 cubic centimetres per minute. In both cases the small, steady rate is what allows the result to be reproduced.

Sixty cubic centimetres per minute is one cubic centimetre per second, and a thousand is a litre per minute. So a typical mass flow controller set to 500 sccm is delivering half a litre of gas a minute — about the volume of a soft-drink bottle, which is a helpful way to picture what an invisible gas line is actually carrying.

One cubic centimetre per minute equals one millilitre per minute, about 0.01667 cubic centimetres per second, or 0.001 litres per minute.

Information about the US Gallon per second (gal US/s)

The US gallon per second is a unit of volumetric flow rate equal to one United States gallon passing a point every second. Its symbol is gal US/s. The US gallon is exactly 3.785411784 litres, descended from the English wine gallon of 231 cubic inches, so one US gallon per second is a little under four litres every second.

Fire protection in the United States works at this scale. A fire hydrant flows several gallons per second, a pumper truck delivers 20 or more, and a large sprinkler system's design demand runs to tens. Fire codes state these figures in gallons per minute, but hydraulic calculations of friction loss in the mains use the per-second value, and the two are the same number divided by sixty.

Municipal water and wastewater engineering also reaches it. A neighbourhood water main carries a few gallons per second at peak hour, a lift station handles tens, and a treatment plant's influent hundreds. American practice usually states plant capacity in million gallons per day, and one gallon per second is 0.0864 million gallons per day — a conversion any water engineer performs from memory.

Industrial cooling and process water are described here as well. Condenser cooling water, quench flows and washdown systems all reach gallons per second, and the pump power required follows from the flow multiplied by the head, so an increase in flow of ten per cent shows up directly on the electricity bill.

The difference from the imperial gallon deserves a clear statement. The US gallon is about 17 per cent smaller than the imperial one, so the same numerical rate is a materially different flow on either side of the Atlantic. Equipment documentation should say which gallon it means, and prudent engineers convert to litres before comparing anything.

For scale, one US gallon per second is about 3.79 litres per second, and 0.264 US gallons per second is one litre per second. A flow of ten US gallons per second is nearly 38 litres per second, enough to fill a domestic bath in three seconds and comparable to a small stream.

One US gallon per second equals about 3.785 litres per second, about 0.003785 cubic metres per second, or about 0.8327 imperial gallons per second.