Hello, Júlia here,
So our project it’s finally taking a form and we are excited about our results, as we have planned for this week we tested our calculations by laser cutting our gears and try to make everything work, and it did (yey). We were very very happy, there’s a video that show us using our mechanism, by hand cranking the syringe is being pushed down to dispense the emulsion in the film, and the photo in the right shows the part in the back that contains our compounds gears to create our 1:10 scale of our gear for the rack and pinion.
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After that, was suggested to us to make our system more efficient by reducing the number of gears from our project, so we started to make a new medium-fidelity prototype so we could arrange that, and our team decided to make our new one into scale, so it contains all the components of our project, like the reels with the film and the roller, that it didn’t have on the other one because there wasn’t too much space on it, so that we could test all of our variances like the flow rate that is required to coat the actual 6 ft length of film. Below there’s our new prototype and we are working on it right now.
We attached everything that our machine needs to coat the film, but we are also facing some obtacles to make everything work perfectly, we kind expected that haha, there’s always something to fix. So the problems that we faced was the roller wasn’t turning, for that we tried to make it smaller but it didn’t worked because it was too big for the space we needed it, so we 3D printed another one with the right size. Still wasn’t working so we synchronized it with our gears and now it works.
We tested our isolation method, a blanket that goes around the syringe to keep it in the right range of temperature to apply the emulsion in the film, that is 40°C to 55°C, and in the time of 10 min, that it’s the maximum time that we thing we need to coat 6 ft of film, the temperature dropped to 39°C, so it works OK, it’s not the best solution, but it’s economically viable. Then, our pulleys arrived (in 1 day we were chocked) and we implemented in our project because we were having problems with the belts too, because since we needed to attach the roller to another pulley we couldn’t find a right belt for our system, but it’s made of metal so we are currently working on solutions to minimize that. And the last thing is that our hand crank broke beacuse of the weight of the pulleys (we assumed).
Therefore, we made so much progress we still have some implementations problems to work on it. We are excited with our project and hell yeah we are going to make it work!
About our weekend me and Rebeca visited the Houston Museum of Natural Science and it was awesome, there’s a lot of interesting stuff to see there, I went to a baseball game and I loved it and we went downtown again and we went to a new mall. Our time in Houston it’s ending and I can say for sure that there’s a lot of good memories, friendships and so much knowledge that I’m experiencing it here and I’m definitely gonna missed.
Wish us luck and see you next week!