The DesiGators found their home away from home this week in the IPPD labs. The team spent countless hours split between Larry’s Lab, the Wertheim Prototyping Lab, and the FSHN lab working hard to get their prototypes built and ready for Prototype Inspection Day! The first item on the agenda was getting the airflow holes drilled into the acrylic drying chamber. Acrylic is a difficult material to work with, so the team enlisted the help of master engineer and director of the Wertheim Lab, Jeff Bielling, to help drill the holes.
With the preliminary holes drilled for the box, the team will be able to demonstrate how air will enter and exit the chamber while carrying moisture away from the food. Of course the next question the team had to address was what the food would be resting on inside the chamber. The main consideration was finding a mesh with large enough openings to let air through that was also sturdy enough to support its own weight. After a week of waiting and testing various samples, the team finally settled on one size and created their first set of trays!
The trays will need to be cleaned up and improved for the final design, but the concept works! The team was closing in on the home stretch for the week, and the completion of the tray design was the last thing that was needed. While the team had been working on the chamber and the trays, Virginia had been hard at work on improving the load cell configuration. She spent several hours in the lab soldering the load cells to their amplifier chips and attaching the 3D printed plates to the load cells themselves. The culmination of this week’s efforts can be seen below, a dual-load cell system which can be placed inside the acrylic drying chamber with a tray on top; this system can get accurate mass measurements and is the perfect visual tool for Prototype Inspection Day to show what our system is capable of. Stay tuned to hear how the event turned out!
