Alex is back

Alex is back and boy am I glad to see him. Here at Hi-Z I am working on two projects and supporting production. Each of these tasks could easily be a full time job but I'm trying to do them by myself. The good thing is that I love all of them and my frustration would be similar to Christmas dinner. I want to eat it all but it is a physical impossibility. Lucky for me Alex came along. As you are all aware, Alex graduated this year and is preparing to head to the University of Utah in the fall. Unfortunately in spite of Obama's borrowing (printing) of a trillion dollars for his stimulus package no one can get a job. It looked like Alex was destined to get a job at a Jack-in-the-Box or something when all of a sudden I realized that under my direction he could do so much of the work that I needed to get done. I talked to my boss and now Alex works for me for the summer. This is a good deal for Alex because he has a job that is a good more fulfilling and less boring that Jack-in-the-Box. It is a good deal for me because this is as rewarding as if I could eat twice as much food at Christmas dinner, better actually because I can have Alex do the jobs that I would find somewhat annoying. It is a good deal for Hi-Z because Alex is actually doing the work that they would be paying me to do but they pay him a lot less than they would pay me to do it.

Alex has worked with me now for two weeks and with him gone this week I have definitely felt his absence. I'm really glad to have him back but now I'm quite worried about September when he leaves for good. These pictures are just some of the things Alex does for me.

The picture at the top of this posting is of the raw materials required to fabricate a PbTe ingot. In this photo Alex's quartz tube containing the raw materials is being sealed.


The ingot is ground to a powder and pressed into legs. There are "P" type conducting legs and "N" type conducting legs. Alex arranged a P and N type leg to form a couple as shown here. Tiny thermocouples and voltage probes are welded to the leg to instrument it. Alex thinks he's pretty good at welding the probes onto the legs.
The couple is then loaded into a test station as shown here. The block above the couple is an electric heater and the block below the couple is a water cooled chill plate.

Once the test station is all sealed up in an argon-hydrogen mix then Alex takes data. It looks like Alex is almost to the point where I can just give him the formulation that I want and he can react the ingot, grind it to a powder, press the powder into legs, build the legs into a couple, load the couple into the test station and take the data. That will be my nirvana. I can hand him a formulation and he will give me data. How can life get much better than that?
A lot of other people want to use Alex to help them out as well. Alex sand blasted and sealed this water cooled chill plate from our 50 ton vacuum hot press. This press can load a sample with 50 tons of force, pull a 10 micron vacuum and heat it to 2,000°C. That is pretty exciting stuff.

There is a bunch more stuff that Alex does but I don't have pictures of it all. Perhaps as the summer progresses I will post more pictures. Right now, I'm just glad to have him back.

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When Apollo 11's lunar lander, the Eagle, separated from the orbiter, the cabin wasn't fully depressurized resulting in a burst of gas equivalent to popping a champagne cork. It threw the modules landing four miles off target.

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