Charles (Charlie) Hetzel

Prior to joining NSLS-II, Charles Hetzel held the title of Lead Project Engineer for a design and manufacturing organization. He was responsible for the design and manufacture of automated industrial machinery and worked in industry for over 15 years before joining Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Charles attained his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Polytechnic University in Farmingdale.

Upon joining the NSLS-2 project in 2009, Charles was responsible for the design, procurement and fabrication of the storage ring vacuum chambers. This effort included the qualification and integration of these chambers into the magnet-girder assemblies and final installation in the storage ring tunnel. In addition, Charles helped managed the production of the rf bellows which interconnect the storage ring vacuum chambers and the photon absorbers which protect various critical components. All of these components required detailed FEA to ensure they will survive the high power densities produced from the installed x-ray sources. Charles took over as the vacuum group leader at NSLS-2 in 2014 and continued resource planning and scheduling major installation efforts as additional beam lines were added to the accelerator. Also during this time he lead the design and development of a thin film coating system for ceramic vacuum chambers as well as NEG coating on titanium chambers. This system was then reconfigured to apply a high emissivity coating to in vacuum components in order to increase the radiative heat transfer. After developing the pre-conceptual vacuum designs for the electron rings under an MOU, Charles joined the EIC project full time in October of 2020 to focus on more detailed engineering designs. Recent efforts have been focused on developing an actively cooled beam screen and new interconnect bellows for the hadron ring upgrade in addition to advancing the electron ring vacuum systems designs for the upcoming CD2 project milestone