ANCORP Chamber Stories

chamber_stories
ANCORP is proud to introduce our new “Chamber Stories” blog! Over the past 50 years, ANCORP has fabricated some very interesting custom chambers and other products. In this blog we will tell the stories behind some of these builds and how the research teams behind these chambers are breaking barriers in Science and Technology.

One of our most recent builds was a box chamber for Cornell University. Austin Cao from Cornell gave us the following information about this chamber.

“The Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) is a National Science Foundation funded facility located on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York. CHESS provides high-energy synchrotron X-rays serving over 1300 user visits from the physical, biological, engineering, and life sciences. The 2018 upgrade (CHESS-U) is a major effort utilizing a $15M grant to upgrade the facilities to produce even brighter X-rays.

The Sector 4 Double Crystal Monochromator (DCM) is a device that transmits a mechanically selectable band of wavelengths of radiation. This instrument requires ultra-high vacuum and extreme stability and precision. Because of how small the equipment area is, custom vacuum chambers are often a necessity. The Sector 4 DCM chamber is a custom UHV vacuum chamber that fits precisely into “Sector 4”, an area with a skewed back wall. Because of the size of the equipment inside the chamber, a custom wire-seal door to install large components was required. This aluminum wire-seal is a process commonly used on large vacuum chambers at Cornell, as rubber gaskets degrade over time due to the nuclear radiation inside the facility.“

The new chamber will be installed as a “hutch” tangent along the synchrotron beam line. It will hold instrumentation with a diamond that diffracts an incoming x-ray beam (Bragg’s Law). For example: X-rays used to study metallurgical stress (think of repeatedly bending a paperclip––this is what happens to airplane wings!)

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