Gluing machine A semi automatic machine to glue emulsion plate on adhesive tape (as done by Japanese colleagues) was realized and delivered to Bologna scanning lab. The output of this machine is a continuous stream of emulsion plates interleaved by spacers. Obviously, before scanning with ESS, the stream must be cutted to obtain a single plate.

Tape and Spacer Specifications lateral tape 100 120 - 170 lateral tape 10 - 20 Tests performed using : - acrylic adhesive tapes: Nitto model 31C and model 3161F (80 µm thickness, 140 mm width) spacers and lateral tapes: PVC (300 µm thickness) Nitto tapes are suitable for our purpose. Tests of (more) rigid spacer and/or lateral tapes are in progress.

Comments Since the plates are manually loaded, a better alignment can be obtained by preparing the plate-spacer sequence before to submit it to the machine. Using a manual commercial cutter, the final positioning accuracy [i.e. the distance between the emulsion corner and the corner of final glued plate] can be of ~0.5 mm. A better precision could be obtained by developing a suitable custom cutting tool.

Demo gluing_machine_080109.mpg

Costs and operational times Acrylic adhesive tape: 60 euro/roll (140 mm x 50 m) [order ~ 50 rolls] 1 brick ~ 12 m  4 bricks/roll  15 euro/brick PVC tape: 3.5 euro/roll (20 mm x 50 m) 0.04 euro/spacer  3 euro/brick Expected operational time to glue 1 brick (1 person) : strip preparation: ~ 10 min gluing machine: ~ 10 min (manual) cutting: ~ 20 min

Conclusions The gluing machine is working. Tests are still in progress to choose the best operative procedures and to try other materials. Delivery to LNGS is possible at the end of January.