Equipment description of proposed RDA-5 canning machine.

摘要

The General Engineering Laboratory has submitted a cost estimate and a proposal covering the design, fabrication, construction, and testing of a uranium slug canning machine. This machine will cover requirements for mechanization of only the operations occurring within the aluminum-silicon canning bath. These operations are: Can and cap preheating, Can and cap wetting, Canning assembly, and Quenching. Stated briefly, the machine is required to insert a prepared uranium slug into an aluminum can and close the can opening with an aluminum cap. All assembly operations will be carried out beneath a molten bath of standard Hanford aluminum-silicon bonding alloy. The uranium slug is preheated and prewetted before being manually transferred to the slug assembly and quench machine. The process performed by the machine will be integrated with the manual slug preheating and wetting equipment so that proper preheating and wetting is attained before the slug is inserted into the machine. After assembly the completed canned slug will be transferred to the water quenching station, where the components are held firmly together until the molten aluminum-silicon has frozen, forming a homogeneously bonded assembly. This report provides a detailed description of the machine.