Starting research in a lab is always pretty involved: there's a bunch of safety trainings you have to get through, you acclimate to a new lab environment and the expectations of your mentor and professor. My mentor, like Dr. Whitesides, is pretty hands-off. I have a fairly wide reign over my project.
I started off with laser-cutting a couple of designs that we'll later on heat-seal together, invert, then inflate. Below you can see two of them: a flower design and a cylindrical design (with the later judged to be much more hopeful than the former, as it was more practically shaped). The brown cut is the heat-resistant paper that we would sandwich between two layers of the green cut, so we only seal the edges and not the insides. Then we'd be able to invert the material, just for aesthetics purposes (seams on the outside = less good-looking).
For the laser-cutting step, I drew out the designs on Adobe Illustrator 2003 (the computer in the lab was pretty old) and "printed" them to the laser cutting machine, which did the designs for me. Breathing vaporized polymer was an experience!
I also worked on materials characterization, which meant I took the green elastomer film to the Instron tensile testing machine. The Instron stretches the machine to the breakage point and gathers data on the extension and the force exerted through the process, which I then process to find Young's modulus, the yield point, and a nice curve. This is also where I got the inspiration to build the web application Dataplotter, which doubled as a final project for my computer science class.
And finally I prototyped a pneumatic channel out of another elastomer TPE film. The video below shows air being drawn through this prototype.
Essentially I heat-sealed four layers of material: two with a white heat-resistant paper sandwiched between, and the last layer sealed such that it left channels for air to pass through. We thought that the material might bend in an interesting way when inflated, and so we made that design decision.
Looking forward to what more research has to bring after break :)
Comments