A New Tool for Rapid Additive Manufacturing of Large Area Detectors

Radiation detectors are broadly useful for nuclear nonproliferation as well as many scientific, medical, and defense applications. One element of these detectors is often a microchannel plate, which can amplify signals by a factor of a million, allowing single particles to be detected with normal electronics. Microchannel plates are currently made by an expensive and laborious process. We have pioneered creating these structures by using a commercial 3d printer with very high resolution. Unfortunately, the design of this printer makes it very slow. A dimesized device takes over 50 hours to print. This has been adequate for exploring the technique, but is much too slow for creating detectors of useful size for example 12x12cm, the size of a compact disc case. We have a design for a new 3d printer that will be much faster. In phase I of this work, design and testing of key components were done, and we proved the principle of threshold writing – which is akin to drawing a thin line with the thick marker. This means that we can 3d print very fine objects very quickly. We will build and test a prototype and demonstrate that it can quickly print useful size microchannel plates for use in radiation detectors for national nuclear security applications. A new, patent applied for objective will be procured, along with custom lasers and a scanning system, and everything will be integrated into a working system. Smartphonesized test prints will be activated by materials scientists at Argonne, and tested by their high energy physicists. This technology could lead to a 3d printer that is directly useful for many applications. Any customers who want large, high precision and surface finish pieces in thermoplastic would find this interesting. For example, rapid prototyping shops would be customers for the printer. The radiation detector has many other uses, such as for homeland security, medical imaging, and analytical lab instruments.