Design of a Resistive Plate Counter using additive manufacturing

Research demonstrates that technological progress in additive manufacturing is mature to ensure high-quality and reliable devices. This emerging interdisciplinary engineering science is becoming commercial and very well documented while opening to new opportunities in several fields. However, it is currently unknown how this additive manufacturing technique might work when applied to frontier technologies such as particle physics detectors as a whole. We hypothesize that a fully automated 3D stack printing of a detector would be ideal to drastically reduce: 1) detector construction time 2) the number of runtime construction errors 3) the probability of mistakes during construction. The initial hypothesis is that 3D printing, applied to instrumentation for physics, will enhance detector performance and capabilities, cutting construction costs and improving standardization over large scale productions. By fully optimizing the entire design and by implementing the construction via additive manufacturing, the expectation is to achieve a standardized RPC detector, mechanically more resistant/resilient and electrically more stable if compared to the state-of-the-art. The successful implementation of this project has the long-term objective to impact not only the physics domain but also the security (cargo imaging and general- purpose scanners) and healthcare (tomography machines) domains, where particle detectors are widely adopted.