Development of conductive coated polyester film as RPC electrodes using screen printing

We still need to study the long term stability and best curing method. We need to automate the procedure to get a uniform coat and to coat a large number of glasses for the final detector. While robotic systems are available abroad costing about 5 000 000 rupees, we are exploring other alternatives. In particular, we are in the process of developing a polyester film, with a conductive coating on one side, which can be glued on to the glass. The coating was done using on a local commercial screen printing machine (Grafica Flextronica, Vasai, India) using the screen printing ink viz. CARBO PASTE DC-1000M and DC-20 (Dozen Tech, Korea). A surface resistivity of a few hundred kΩ/square was obtained on a 100 mm thick polyester sheet of dimension 0.7 M×1.2 M. Curing was done for ∼30 minutes at 150 °C. We are planning to test this film on a glass RPC very soon.