We have made real progress toward having cars follow our leader car, so decided to add another follower with different sensing. It is exciting seeing the cars communicating and following, although very slowly so for now.
T-shirts were delayed but will come this week.
This past month has been both exciting and arduous. We have made significant headway into both development of the dual-filter system, as well as an anti-microbial application of nano-particulate silver.
Our engineering groups have been busy refining their existing filtration systems. We have now produced more than 20 clay filters and have continued flow rate testing. Our hope is that as production methods improve, so will flow rate and elimination efficacy. Our second engineering group has made large strides in the creation of a pressurized system - they are also now conducting flow rate testing, and we hope to have positive results next month.
Our chemistry team has been pursuing the use of nano-particulate silver as an anti-microbial agent. We are currently utilizing a blend of nano-particulate silver in the 30-50 nanometer range. Our initial solutions lacked long-term stability; the nano-particles settled in the bottom of the solution under a very small time-frame. We are in the process of securing a sonicator for better dispersion of the silver nano-particles.
Finally, our biology group has restarted testing of filter efficacy. In addition, they intend on testing a silver nano-particulate application as well as a silver nano-particulate serial dilution. Both of the tests should establish the efficacy of our purchased silver, as well as a lower bound on the amount of silver required to kill microbes.
Latest developments for the Rockport High School InvenTeam:
We have established new business relationships with Kaiser Systems (Beverly, Massachusetts), a designer/manufacturer of power supplies and storage devices, as well as Autoliv (Stockholm, Sweden), a maker of auto safety systems such as airbags.
You may rightly deduce by these new partnerships that we are considering a PADS (pneumatic auto-deployment system) that utilizes electronics in place of the mechanical system of the original design. After initial discussions with Kaiser, they assure us that a low voltage, long-term storage, weatherproof power source can be devised to trigger an auto air-bag type of initiator. That answered many (but not all) of our concerns with an electronic solution.
Autoliv, for their part, can supply custom-programmed tilt sensors, as well as staged initiators and small tanks capable of a much greater PSI than the tanks we’ve used thus far. The main concern for us at this point is the final unit cost of this much higher-tech PADS. No longer an off-the-shelf component made device, we need to be wary that our new direction does not lead to a prohibitively expensive solution. This point has been (and will continue to be) made to both Kaiser and Autoliv as we procede.
The students, especially the original 2008 InvenTeam members (who even this year are still only sophomores and juniors), were somewhat reluctant to move away from “their” original PADS. I quite understand (and to some extent share) the sentimental issues involved, but have tried to incorporate the lesson of moving on in the interest of the greater good of the project. In the face of industry non-disclosure forms, and corporate visits, I think they were starting to feel like the project was slipping away from them. In response, I’ve made a solemn vow to them that they are and will remain the PADS project, and will be up to their elbows in it all the way to the end.
Stay tuned for further developments.
Hello from Georgia! We’ve been busy getting started: getting to know everyone and doing some team training through BASIC at the FFA Camp. We have pictures that you can check out at our wikispace: whs-InvenTeam.wikispaces.com.