To implement Cornell policy regarding “COVID-19 Update: Conduct of Research”, CHESS suspended user operation Monday, March 16th, 2020 at noon. User experiments scheduled for March 2020 will not take place. Beamtime allocations for the May/June 2020 cycle have not been made yet and will be delayed until the resumption of user operations has been clarified.
As the need for masks continues to grow, people at CLASSE have been sewing and making masks, while a few people with access to 3D printers have also started to fill the void.
Karl Smolenski, Georg Hoffstaetter, and others, have been printing the headbands needed for face shields. The components are made by using a material called PLA, a common printing medium.
Unfortunately, it takes a long time to print each piece, “I can make 3-4 a day and have been running them all weekend. It takes about 3 hours for each one,” says Karl Smolenski.
Since September 2019, the National Science Foundation (NSF) supports the operation of the Center for High Energy X-ray Sciences (CHEXS) at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) as a national user facility. CHEXS consists of a suite of high-energy X-ray beamlines that serve the national user community in specifically targeted research areas in materials research, biology and engineering.
Since CHESS resumed user operation after the CHESS-U upgrade project in October 2019, the facility has operated at 50mA positron current. Accelerator and beamline scientists have continuously and carefully optimized storage ring parameters and beamline performance to deliver high intensity and stable X-ray beams to users. This effort has allowed us to increase the ring current to 75 mA on Feb. 18 and now to 100mA on March 11th.
In a recent experiment at the Forming and Shaping Technology (FAST) Beamline, researchers from Confluent Medical studied the microstructural evolution of NiTi shape memory alloys during fatigue loading. NiTi shape memory alloys are often used in medical devices including heart valve frames and stents. Due to their critical importance to patient safety, these devices have stringent fatigue lifetime requirements.
CHESS is working in concert with Cornell University to maintain a safe research atmosphere. We have set up a webpage dedicated to keeping our user community up-to-date with any impacts on user operations.
This page can be found HERE.