NECAT Beamline

The Northeastern Collaborative Access Team (NE-CAT) facility at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory is managed by Cornell University and consists of seven member institutions:

  • Columbia University
  • Cornell University
  • Harvard University
  • Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Rockefeller University
  • Yale University.

    • Primary funding for this project comes from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Additional financial support for NE-CAT comes from the member institutions.

    Status of NE-CAT Sector 24 Activities

     

    January 2008 

     

    APS accelerator operation was shut down for preventative maintenance for the month of January. Consequently there is no beamline user experience to report.

    The month long shut down presented an opportunity for the NE- CAT staff to perform preventative maintenance on the beamlines as well as introduce new capabilities for the users upon resumption of APS’ user operation in February. The major new capability introduced during the shut down was the installation of a sample placement robotic system on the 24-ID-C variable energy beam line. A photograph of the current installation is shown below.

     

     

    The robotic system is an originally ALS designed and fabricated system which NE- CAT previously operated on its 8-BM bending magnet beamline. This beamline has been taken out of service and is in the process of being moved to Sector 24. In order to install the robot on to the 24-ID-C beamline extensive modifications were made. The “handedness” of the robot had to be reversed, i.e., looking downstream from the source, the robot had to be installed on the left side of the goniometer rather than the right as was the case of the 8-BM beam line. In performing this change all the electrical wiring and pneumatic tubing were upgraded to provide improved reliability. A new cover for the liquid nitrogen Dewar was also installed to minimize frosting and a gravity-feed liquid-nitrogen delivery system was installed to eliminate turbulence in the liquid nitrogen Dewar containing the samples during automatic filling. The operating software has also been integrated into the beamline data acquisition system. The end result of these many changes is that the robot can now operate unattended for several days mounting and dismounting sample pins hundreds of time without a failure. The first user test of the robot will take place in mid February. If the early user experiences are successful, the robot system will increasingly be scheduled for use by the user community.

     

     

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