NASA Contract for New Electron Beam (EB) Gun and Controls
For many years, Sciaky has been a leader in the development and production of electron beam welding equipment. Sciaky has designed and built Low Voltage, High Voltage, fixed, and moving electron beam gun systems that continue to operate successfully in many of the aerospace, nuclear and automotive industries. Sciaky has been actively pursuing the development of small, low-power gun assemblies for the EBFFF process to complement our robust high-power welding gun designs.
Sciaky currently has a contract in place with NASA Langley Research Center for a new electron beam gun system to be used with the EBFFF process. The new moveable EB gun will be incorporated in an electron beam freeform fabrication system that will be flown on a microgravity research aircraft and, potentially, in space. Due to the criticality for minimized weight and portability of the system, Sciaky will work closely with NASA engineers to provide the new gun with supporting hardware, such as low voltage and high voltage power supplies, controllers, and cables to provide a target weight of 100 pounds.
All support hardware (including required controllers and power supplies), shall be rack-mountable. Connections between support hardware and electron beam gun shall be designed to allow quick disconnect and reconnect for enhanced portability, but have locking connectors to prevent inadvertent disconnection as a result of external vibrations from the zero gravity aircraft.
