A study of new techniques for large-scale glass RPC production

RPCs with float glass electrodes (GSC or glass RPC) have been proposed as active elements for large-detectors (e.g. MONOLITH). Industrial large-scale GSC production has to be standardized in order to have homogeneous, affordable and reproducible detectors. A wide range of industrial glass treatments are already exploited by both glass and automobile industries. Our efforts are aimed to import and adapt such existing techniques for GSC large-scale production. On the other hand, we will design GSC in order to fit into standard industrial automatic production techniques. A first attempt in this direction has been successful, and we have found a way to produce glass with appropriate resistive coating by using industrial automatic silk screen printing techniques with an ad hoc developed synthetic varnish. r 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.