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Welcome everyone to the senior design showcase.
We are team WRAPR. My name is Nigel Booth.
I’m Scott Buchanan.
I’m Ryan Caldwell.
I am Hayden Golay.
And I’m Terry Zimmerman.
So our company is Porvair filtration group. They are an international leader in the development and supply of high performance innovative materials and solutions for applications and filtrations and separation.
All right so a little bit about our project here. So our team was tasked with creating a device that heat seals and wraps a filter with a thin film membrane while reducing contamination, raising production rate, and increasing repeatability. So the company currently does have a way of completing this process but we were asked to improve upon it. We [inaudible]. They did give us a list of needs and requirements that the project must meet. So the first thing we did essentially was set out to do some research and discover if there was anything on the market already that did these steps. But we did come across a device that was somewhat representative of what we were attempting to do. It was an automated thin film membrane wrapping device. Although this device only completed the wrapping portion and did not apply heat seal. We then realized that we needed to set out and create a unique design.
All right so this picture is essentially our first draft. It’s kind of an accumulation of all of our ideas together. So in orange here we’ve got the frames that supports the everything else. In blue we’ve got the filter that’s going to be wrapped in heat sealed. And then we’ve got three different rods. They’re in gray with points at the end of them which are the heating elements that are going to heat seal the thin film membrane. And we chose those heating elements to be soldering irons. So originally the soldering iron on the bottom was meant to be used by a technician that will create a heat seal across the device and then the two soldering irons on top were to be rotated down onto the filter and then once they hit the filter we would then turn that hand crank a full 360 degrees to create a heat seal around the filter on both ends of it.
And then finally the last step would be to… so we’ve got a handle on the right side, so we would slide that to the right and then we would take the filter out and then replace it with the new one on a new unwrapped filter and then essentially we would complete the process all over again.
Although one major flaw in this in our first design was that we did not, we did not account for the thin film membrane that would be wrapping around the device. That and the cutting of the thin film membrane, it was definitely the most challenging part of this design. But later on in this presentation we will discuss the major improvements and solutions we came up with ever since this first conception.
All right so we’ve got five goals essentially we wanted to meet to complete this project. First of all we wanted to increase the production rate, increase the quality, we wanted this device to be easy to adjust and maintain so that parts can be easily replaced if they degrade over time, we wanted it to be easy to use so that almost anyone could use it, and most importantly it needs to be safe to use.
So all these goals essentially tie into this all encompassing goal of creating a device that improves their current process. So on the next slide we will begin to talk about Porvair’s current process.
Yeah thanks Aidan. So like you said before we get into too much detail about our design we came up with let’s look a little bit more closely about the problem we’re solving and what Porvair is doing right now. So the current process is done, it’s very manual process, very hands-on, performed by technician. So the technician would begin by cutting lengths of the filtration material to length just by hand using a pair of scissors. Those pieces would then be wrapped around the core. The technician is of course wearing gloves but it is done by hand. So after it’s wrapped around these pre-made cores they would seal it using using a soldering iron well once again by hands. And then end by trimming off any excess material just using a hobby knife or a razor knife or something like that.
All right so while this current process does produce filters that is being used successfully it’s not a perfect process. There’s certainly room for improvement. So one of the big areas is starting off with his safety. Of course no matter how well trained or how experienced a technician is they’re never going to be, there’s never going to be no risk involved. There’s always going to be some amount of risk when using tools such as soldering iron hot edges or knives and such. So we’re hoping to implement our solution in a way to hopefully mitigate some of that risk and improve the safety of the process.
One very big problem is the amount of touch points that’s currently involved. So these filters as they’re produced must be held to very exacting maturity standards. So anytime a technician touches it even with gloves it introduces the possibility of contamination. So we’re hoping to reduce the amount of times that the technician needs to physically handle the filter itself. Of course along with that is the quality and reliability of the filters. Being a process done by hand, there’s always some room for variation in the between individual filters so hopefully we can improve the repeatability of the process. And finally the speed and productivity. The technician’s doing quite a bit by hand right now so hopefully by automating some of this so you can improve the production rate.
All right so specifically how our solution addresses these. So first of all safety by incorporating any potentially hazardous areas such as hot surfaces and sharp edges pinch points etc. By incorporating these to our device and making sure they’re all clearly labeled we can reduce the possibility of a technician accidentally coming into contact with them. But with touch points we can greatly reduce the amount necessary because by automating a lot of these steps there’s only two necessary touch points right now when the technician inserts the core into our device and then again when the core is removed from our device. So we can greatly reduce that chance of contamination. Of course there’s repeatability. By automating a lot of these steps we can make them more reliable, make sure every core is exactly like all the others, reduce some of that, some of the variation that comes with them being handmade. And then of course productivity by reducing the amount of operations that the technician needs to perform we can increase the the rate at which Porvair can produce this product.
So some of the specifications made by our customer Porvair was to have guards in place for pinch points and hot surfaces. Filters should be effective after wrapping and sealing process is completed. Minimize the amount of human touch points. No contamination to the membrane. Increase production per workday. Operated by one technician. Budget goal of under $500 and accommodate various school sizes.
All right. So this is an isometric view of our current mostly final design. The frame itself we made out of 820 aluminum and that allows for a lot of adjustments and different sizes and different sized cores you can swap out any component you would want. The dark rectangle boxes that you see there, those are the precision mounts for the heating elements. At the very center of the white core and to the right of that is the duckbill clamp that we use to apply the material with. The black box in the very back middle there is the step motor that we use for precision mounts for that. Okay.
All right so here we have an animation showing the full process. So the membrane is not shown in this video but heat seal lines are shown on the orange lines and next we’re going to break it down by step by step to show what each step is.
All right so the first step is the loading. So you can see that the core is inserted and the plunger is pushed forward by the spring there and it indexes on those three holes there that are mounted onto the stepper motor. Next slide. All right. And then here you can see the duckbill clamp pulling forward the membrane which is in here and it pulls it forward towards the core and just gets it ready for the longitudinal seal.
So here you can see that our first soldering iron comes down from the left and it does the longitudinal seal. This will hold the thin film membrane onto the core while it rotates. Okay, here you can see both the rotation happening and the radial seal. These happen at the same time because how fast it occurs. It is very prudent to getting a good seal. And this is to also seal any gases from escaping from the top or bottom of the core. Here we have the second longitudinal seal and this is to basically finish off the core and then the cut would be made after that to make sure that there’s no excess membrane hanging off of the core.
Here you can see the unloading process is just a reverse of the loading process. And yeah sorry. Here we have the pinball mechanism and it’s called that because there’s a spring plunger there on the end and it’s pulled back to load and unload and it’s guided by that gray box there that’s a linear bearing. That black conical plug at the end of it is what’s holding the core onto the stepper core shown here is has no features to protect intellectual property. That gray cylinder on the left side of the core is the indexing cap and then we have our stepper motor there on the left.
All right let’s take a look at the heating elements we have. The elements we chose were designed to work really simply but effectively for what we need to do. All three of them are attached to precision mounts so we can control with a lot of precision in all three axes whether we need to move you know up, down, left, right, back, forward to get the best performance that we need. So once the core is inserted and the material has been placed alongside the core the longitudinal seal on the left is just going to rotate clockwise and using the handles. They’re not shown. So the tip is touching the material on the far edge. It’s then going to slide down the shaft along the length of the core and once it’s reached the ends rotate it back under it back up into place. Then the radial ceiling elements on the right are going to rotate down in counter-clockwise to be put in place and the core is going to be rotated so the material is sealed along the circumference of the cores on the top and the bottom. And then they’ll be lifted back up into place and the final longitudinal seal will be taken.
And then lastly we just need to cut the material along that seal and remove the core. Okay. And this is our clamp the material that we use for wrapping is really flexible and it stretches very easily so we needed a specially designed clamp to hold and deliver the material without stretching it or tearing it. So the duckbill clamp that we designed as a flat internal surface that’s smoothed and polished, the clamps lifted up, the material is slipped under, and then the clamp is lowered. The mechanism itself actually slides forward along the rails to the core and the flat lips were designed to allow the material to approach as tangent to the top center of the core as possible without pressing into it and causing any potential damage. And so once that first seal is made that clamp can just be lifted up and slid back and acts as a guide for the rest of the material to flow through to route the rest of the core with. Okay.
Here’s our total budget of $575. Commercial off the shelf caught our materials was linear slide rails, brackets, stepper motor, arduino board, raw materials such as 80 20 aluminum rails, and sheet metal. $80 was put into safety equipment such as personal protective equipment like gloves and masks and then fasteners came out to fifty dollars machine screws and pre-made packets.
Okay here we have our ethical analysis. We narrowed it down to basically two categories of ethics that pertain to our tool and those are utility and rights. So this tool shouldn’t cause any harm to stakeholders. If it’s only meant to increase production rates and mitigate contamination. So the increased production rate would cause a greater yield and that would have a positive financial impact for Porvair and a possible morale increase for the operator. If it does achieve its desired outcome there would be less risk of injury for the operator and less risk than if they were to be wrapping the filters by hand. And then for rights the operator has the right to signs denoting any hot surfaces or pinch points, sharp surfaces, things like that. And then second and third party rights are also upheld with the right to a safe filter.
All right so we are currently we’re not done building our device. We’ve got about a week left in the semester that we hopefully we will finish it by then. We’re still waiting on some parts to come in but as you can see in this picture here. This is our current progress that we’ve made so as you can see there’s still a little bit to be done. But after we finish building it we’re gonna we plan to move on to testing and for testing we’re going to be seeing how many we’re going to be testing the production rates seeing how many we can do in a specified amount of time. We’re going to check the boxes off to see if we met all the customer specifications. And then we are going to check for the quality to see if the kit, if the filter is actually contaminated or not and then if it you know based on the results we’ll make the necessary changes. And then so most importantly would be safety. We need to optimize the safety of the user so this device. If the thin film membrane is heated too much it can produce toxic fumes and there are a few pinch points on this device to watch out for. And then finally since there are three heating elements soldering irons there is a chance that burning could occur. So pretty much we’re just going to finalize our improvements, purchase any additional parts if necessary, and do any more machining.
All right so there’s a lot of improvements we would like to make. A lot of things that we would have liked to have done this semester but we just did not have time to do. So first things we would do is we would get rid of the handles which were not actually shown in the current design because we don’t have them on yet but we would get rid of the handles and replace them all with automated controls. You know because, get rid of the handles reduce any pretty much just reduce human interaction as much as possible. We would upgrade to more reliable high quality parts. We would automate the cutting and clamping of the device as this was probably the most difficult part of the project. We’d have to spend a lot of time on that. And then after those changes are made pretty far down the road we would add an addition that would check for contaminants while the filter is still in the device.
And then so when we give this device to Porvair we have made it in such a way that it is really easy to take apart and add or replace different parts especially with the 80 20 aluminum. So then Porvair can make continuous improvements on the device. But ultimately our final end goal is to achieve 100 percent automation because with 100 percent automation reduces human interaction as much as possible to reduce that contamination.
All right thank you does anyone have any questions?
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