Rapid tooling technology is regarded as an important method of reducing the cost and time to market in a new product development process. Silicone rubber mold is frequently used in indirect tooling. Automatic vacuum casting system is widely used to degas in the manufacturing of silicon rubber mold, but the cost of hardware is very expensive. A low-cost automatic vacuum degassing system is desig...

Spacecraft propulsion systems, such as Hall thrusters, are designed and tested in large vacuum chambers. The pumping capacity of modern facilities makes it possible to maintain pressures as low as 3 10 4 10 Pa. In this study, several free molecular models are developed to analyze the background flow inside a vacuum chamber. These models lead to various sets of analytical results including veloc...

As part of the research and development effort for a 4th generation light source, we have designed a 4-meter long Free-Electron Laser (FEL) undulator. The undulator will be installed at the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) at Brookhaven National Laboratory to conduct a SelfAmplified Spontaneous Emission (SASE) demonstration. The demonstration is called VISA, which stands for “Visible to Infrared...

It has been shown that if ordinary scotch tape is unrolled in a vacuum, it will emit x-rays and visible light. The proposed experiment will investigate this property by building a suitable vacuum chamber and observing the x-rays from various tapes, unrolled at different speeds, and under different vacuum conditions. Introduction It has been known since 1953 [1] that scotch tape can emit x-rays ...

There are many advantages to miniaturizing systems for chemical and biological analysis. Recent interest in this area has led to the cre ation of several research programs, including a Micro Gas Analyzer (MGA) project at MIT. The goal of this project is to develop an inexpensive, portable, real-time, and low-power approach for detect ing chemical and biological agents. Elements entering the MGA...

We propose and demonstrate a pump-phase locking technique that makes use of weak pump depletion (WPD) - an unavoidable effect that is usually neglected - in a sub-threshold optical parametric oscillator (OPO). We show that the phase difference between seed and pump beam is imprinted on both light fields by the non-linear interaction in the crystal and can be read out without disturbing the sque...

There is a great need for the development of a robot to perform painting and cleaning of high-rise buildings and tanks and similar dangerous tasks. The Mechanical Engineering Laboratory has been developing a wall cl i rnbing robot (kAEL-SPIDER) which can adhere to rough-finished walls using vacuum suction cups and can move up and down as well as to the right and left. Two prototypes were studie...

A vacuum-sealed miniature X-ray tube based on a carbon nanotube field-emission electron source has been demonstrated. The diameter of the X-ray tube is 10 mm; the total length of the tube is 50 mm, and no external vacuum pump is required for the operation. The maximum tube voltage reaches up to 70 kV, and the X-ray tube generates intense X-rays with the air kerma strength of 108 Gy·cm2 min-1. I...