Believe it or not, me and two other students were tasked with repairing  Wentworth’s nano particle generator. I know, a couple students working on a machine which has parts that cost more than a years tuition seems crazy, but hey. I got to work on a nano particle generator because the department head had the students repair the machine, so that’s awesome.

The machine uses two seperate sputtering sources, a 1″ diameter sputtering source, and a 3″ diameter sputtering source, and the more visible of those is the 1″ sputtering source. The window on the front and center allows a direct view of it, and when it is active, the soft glow of plasma can be seen around it. Naturally, this is the source used when demonstrating the machine. So, the source is powered at a very high voltage, and current limited to a very low current, the problem was that at high voltages, things tend to arc, and the source was not able to reach a high enough voltage. This was because residue had built up inside of the sputtering source, and it just needed to be cleaned out. That’s where we came in. Below, you can see us taking apart the sputtering source, cleaning it with acetone and re-assembling it.