As soon as the lockdown in France had been reduced, the first stages of the tasks planned for Bertin Aubert (the BAI partner of WP8 in charge of the pilot line) and which had been delayed accordingly, have been organized :
- First a series of lab tests have been peformed within BAI Lab, under the supervision of Emmanuel Robert, assisted by Pascal Négré (IPM²). The printer with its special ink had been collected at PEL in UK by Pascal Négré and installed at BAI, and the rest of the equipment had been delivered prior to the March lockdown (beakers, UV Vis spectrometer, etc…). The tests were preformed with small samples from PEL printed on site at BAI and then Cu plated according to the instructions given by AGAS (Jonathan Sellars) earlier and during our visit in UK.
- Afterwards, the pilot line has been prepared to receive the chemicals and a series of analyses were done to ensure the quality of the standards and concentrations. A video monitoring with PEL and AGAS, plus COVUNI, had been set up for this preliminary action.
The first tests in the pilot line were afterwards conducted after the summer holidays, with different type of samples, coming from PEL and pre-inked with the special ink prepared with COVUNI. These tests are accompanied by regular checks of the chemicals levels and concentration, and are still in progress to-date.