Z-Accelerator Cleaning Robot

Sandia National Laboratories Engineering, 2011-12

Liaison(s): Mike Lopez PhD, Decker Spencer
Advisor(s): Anthony Bright
Students(s): Maximillian Gonzalez (TL-S), Alyssa Paulson (TL-F), Brian Soe, Jonathan Schwartz (S), Hannah Groshong (S), Andrew Loeb (F), Edward Ruan (F)

The team designed, developed, and tested an operator-controlled robot which cleans the insulator stack of the Z-Accelerator at Sandia National Laboratories. The team machined and built a functioning first prototype of the robot that removes any metal slag from the insulator ring surface by sanding it off. The robot provides consistent, full-surface sanding to increase the performance of the stack and reduces the turnover time for experiments by speeding up the cleaning process.