Investigation of the Timesaver process for de-burring and cleaning the plate for the Atlas Tilecalorimeter

The Timesaver belt grinding machine has been selected by the Atlas collaboration for deburring the master and spacer plates after die stamping and laser cutting, respectively. However, the question has been raised as to whether or not the plates are sufficiently clean after going through the Timesaver machine to immediately be glued into a submodule assembly. This would greatly enhance the production of submodules because the task of cleaning individual master and spacer plates is labor intensive and time consuming as well as raises environmental issues with the detergent that is used. In order to investigate the possibility of using the Timesaver process to clean the plates as well as debur them, several plates were run through the machine and their cleanliness inspected before and after. In addition, several glue samples were subjected to the same process, glued, and then pulled apart in an attempt to gauge the cleanliness of the plates. From this series of tests it can be concluded that the wet Timesaver machine can adequately prepare the surface of the master and spacer plates as well as clean the plates for gluing. The machine was able to adequately remove all of the oil and grime from the test plates. Also, from the single test on the dry machine it appears that significant cleaning will be required to adequately clean the plates before gluing in order to remove the remaining grit