This week our team was finally able to all be back in person 🥳👍 so we immediately went into factory mode. We tested various things including, final design, layering, and other things. As we tested, we realized that it would be much better for us to later the channels to have no fluid transmission between laters and converting it into something you wear on your wrist as we have had issues with leakages.
We first looked at whether our patterned designs work! Below is the more rigid design that we created. The reservoir was too small so it did not fill all the way, but with some force you can see the pattern. There are also bubbles with the liquid which we were able to figure out a mechanism to get rid of them.
For this design, we did the math wrong so the layers were extremely thick and didn’t show both of the designs together as much as we had hoped. So for our next 3d prints we fixed that. It was interesting to see the faint blue pattern though which gave our team much hope for this concept.
As we continued to test, we realized that we need to tap and take out all of the air so that there wouldn’t be any bubble in our reservoir.
After testing our smaller tests, we realized that it would be better to change the design slightly to better fit. Below is our final concept/design.
Alternatively, our team was trying out several experiments that involved both liquid repositories in the same plane, where liquid would travel through a channel from one repository, and enter a channel in another layer, so we could have “overlapping channels” with very little obscured because the layers between channels are thinner. However, we discovered this is extremely hard to bond, likely because the second layer was too thin (silicone kept moving into the .25mm channel). It’s going to be simpler to just layer channels on top of each other, and the color can still be seen pretty well.