Minutes of the Tracker Meeting

December 12, 2000

Tom said that he will put a link to Ossie's report on the magnetics measurement on the Tracker web site.

Tom reported that BJ has designed a preliminary set of tooling for prebending the readout flex cable to facilitate installation. Dave Nelson plans to buy the bad cables at Parlex for testing of this tooling. The cable will be against the inside of the tower wall and held to the closeout by the same transfer adhesive as used for MCM attachment (5 mils thick).

Tom added an approval column and date-ordered column to his procurements list.

Tom reported that Alcomp is on schedule with the carbon-carbon delivery. They are also looking for additional material to sell us for materials testing of the flight lots. The first lot arrives before Christmas.

Tom has not yet looked into YS90 prices in the USA.

Ossie reported that the top tray tooling has been shipped. Its dimensions are "perfect" after the rework. It is shipping fully assembled.

Sandro said that Riccardo is at Plyform to supervise tungsten and Kapton gluing. G&A has tested 113 flight ladders. However, they will do equipment maintenance next week, which will shut down production during that time. Out of the 113, there are 3 bad ladders, included 2 with visibly damaged corners. They are adopting additional controls to prevent this in the future. One of the bad ladders is still a mystery. Encapsulation is still held up by the overflow problem. G&A is still investigating how to avoid this. Sandro estimated mid January for first encapsulated flight ladders. G&A is working on finishing tooling to put trays in the glue dispenser and in the bonding machine. Tom mentioned that a Delvotec engineer could travel to G&A to help with setup for MCM to tray, if needed.

Robert will bring 17 thermal-model MCMs from Teledyne for the EM. The rest will be sent in January after the functional boards are completed

Functional boards should be completed by the end of next week. Tom and UCSC personnel will travel to Teledyne Tuesday through Thursday to do the testing prior to encapsulation.

Sandro said that the mini-MCM was damaged in Pisa. Robert will bring some chips, so that it can be repaired. Robert will also bring some working modules with which to check out the test system there.

Monday Sandro will go to Alenea in Rome. He also will go to Frascati on Thursday to investigate the use of their holographic system with the defective tray.

Luca Baldini and Luca Latronico now have a good knowledge of the EGSE system. They get good results now with threshold scans. They can go up to a 1kHz readout rate and have a plan of tests to carry out. Then they must get back to core issues of test tools preparation. One bottlenecks in Pisa is lack of flex cables.

Robert will check on the flex cable order, but Parlex has recently promissed to deliver in mid December.

Tom agreed to get 2 of the cables he already has assembled at SLAC with connectors and resistors.

Tom reported some preliminary results from COI. They have tested all coupons and are calculating allowables. The failure stresses are consistent with their previous estimates. A report will be delivered soon. Material from flight lots will be used to do more material testing as noted above.

Erik reported that Hytec and SLAC worked out a schedule last Thursday. He has already started the work at Hytec. Preliminary loads were recovered from the old model. They have started to refine that, and they are starting to build a detailed FEM of the bottom tray, capable of stress calculations. Preliminary margins can be expected by mid January. The heat strap analysis is also in progress. The Hytec engineers reviewed the COI corner designs. They suggest some small modifications: taper some edges to reduce stress risers and extend the titanium corner fittings such that the bottom of the corner boss is in titanium. He will send some drawings next week.