Roskilde and discos (on PVC)

A weekend volunteering at the Danish Corner at Roskilde has left me anti-pork and suffering from man-flu. But regardless, I got something done in the last 3 days. Tomorrow I hope to begin gluing the container together in preparation for filling and sealing. I hand in August 7. Yikes.

Wafer set up before cutting

Disco cutting

Today we finished cutting out the wick sections thanks to help from another Danchip employee, Majken Becker. The Disco saw danced through the silicon like M.J. doing the moon walk through butter. However, I lost a couple of sections due to some work I did on the pieces beforehand. In order to label the sections, I used a glass cutter to mark them with Roman numerals from I - V. Funny, I thought the Roman numerals would look better (classy) but the straight lines I scratched into the surface must have aligned with the crystals in the silicon and once sawing began, the crack propagated through the whole section. 3 out of 10 wick sections were lost in this way. AND while drying the wick sections after a dose in the ultrasonic bath (5 minute blast), I was drying them with an air gun and nearly lost another part after it blew out of my hands and hit the floor. Manflu.  

PVC plastic cover for heat pipe

PVC container sections

10 covers have been machined using a milling process. The material is PVC and was chosen because it was available and a quick calculation shows that it should be OK under pressures up to 2 bar with a wall thickness of 1 mm. A 1 mm diameter hole has been drilled in the centre for filling. I am not looking forward to filling and sealing. I will need to ensure that there are no other gases in the cavity and it needs to be sealed at the hole. The glue and hole need to hold when in operation.

Alicona image of cover wall showing debris

The milling process has left some debris around the edges which could contaminate the capillary structure. Even after 5 minutes in ultrasonic bath, there still appear to be leftovers from the milling so it might be necessary to sand these down. But then that could lead to further debris (finer debris) so I will probably go around the edge with a tweezers and pluck them off like hair from a brow.