Summary
Expedition 401 Mediterranean-Atlantic Gateway Exchange began in Amsterdam, Netherlands on December 12th and ended in Naples, Italy on February 9th. We drilled a total of 4 sites for the extent of the expedition recovering sediment. The samples processed in the x-ray lab where as follows:
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- Bulk (~2hr scan)
- random mount
- 4°-70°
- Step: 0.02°
- Scanning speed: 2s/step
- Clay (~1hr scan)
- oriented mount
- 4°-40°
- Step: 0.02°
- Scanning speed: 2s/step
Issues
The Bruker had some flow issues towards the end of the dry dock that continued during this expedition. The flow was ~4.45L/min in the beginning of this expedition which is enough flow to keep the x-rays running on the machine. After running some samples regularly the flow started to decrease until it was to low for the x-rays to be on and the security circuit turned off the x-rays because of low water flow.
Sample handler issues
The Bruker Sample handler arm got stuck in a sample carrying the basket that the sample goes in to go into the machine. The handler does and up and down quick movement, but it doesn't initialize. This happened twice the first time I was able to initialize the machine and it continued making measurements, but after it took the sample out it got stuck again. I wasn't able to finish running the samples in the Bruker after this happened since the sample handler won't move positions. You can only readjust the sample handler when the machine is off. The machine also won't initialize so I can't manually measure the samples either. The 10 samples left for measurement were glycolations, and a similar measurement program was made for the AERIS and the remaining samples where measured there. XRD commander is also not able to initialize the machine.
Haskris
The Haskris had some water flow issues that where causing the x-rays to turn off in the Bruker 4 Endeavor. In order to fix these issues we first flushed out the heat exchanger in the catwalk and reinstalled it. The heat exchanger was not that dirty because it had already been replaced during the dry dock. At this time we also cleaned out the filter in the water tank. We tightened the pressure valve to see if that would increase the flow, and it did. The flow was increased between 4 - 5 L/min and the x-rays where able to turn back on and I continued measuring samples. The water flow issues came back after a week, and we cleaned out the filter gain as well as tightening and untightening the pressure valve to see if that could reset the flow of water. This worked again to increase the flow of water into the Bruker. However, the ET said that if it happened again we would have to replace the pump.
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