Hello friends! We hope everyone has had a great week and is settling into the new year.

EvapoGATOR has no time to ease into the new semester because we’ve been busy:

• ordering the main process units for our system
• testing the evaporator that was delivered over winter break
• preparing for QRB1 at the end of this month

For QRB1, our team will have a presentation exhibiting all the work we’ve accomplished since SLDR when we presented our final design to coaches, liaisons, and our peers. This semester, we are focusing on building and testing the system, and QRB1 is just the first checkpoint to make sure we’re on the right track.

In the next 10 days, we will prepare for QRB1 by:

• completing testing on the evaporator
• choosing three new phase separator options
• creating a detailed project plan for the rest of the semester
• working on a PowerPoint for the presentation
• finalizing the CAD assembly model
• purchasing smaller components for the system
• purchasing square tubing and having it welded

EvapoGATOR intends to make good progress on building our vacuum evaporator system and testing the specific parts by this first milestone.

Additionally, our team is excited to share that we submitted an abstract about this project to the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) with the help of our coach, Dr. Philip Jackson, and it was accepted! This means that we will work together on a research paper that will highlight the importance of our project and its impact on students’ educational experiences in the FSHN department. EvapoGATOR is grateful for this opportunity and ready to get started with compiling the work we’ve completed so far with the data we get this semester.

Okay, this has been a bit of a long blog post, so now please enjoy a picture of us in the lab with the evaporator we were testing!