April Minutes

4/1/2011

• Met with Professor Lima today to discuss materials for the working prototype, when they would come in, and also needed to research valve manifolds to control the system of pumps that will be used to suck media out of the chamber.
• Researched information on manifolds which will be added to the website shortly.

4/19/2011

• Met as a group with Professor Lima to discuss how the media will be transported from the chamber individually so that it can be controlled to prevent contamination and remove excess waste. the individual chambers consist of inlet ports for media coming in, air outlets for sucking the media out, a filter for preventing cross-contamination, and an outlet for transferring media to the waste disposal. Waste from each of the individual chambers would go through a pump after being “rejoined” into one pipe via a series of connectors, and then dumped out as waste. Also attempted to figure out how a flow meter could be used to control which pipe is allowing media to pass through in say, a manifold.
• Designed these systems on PowerPoint and briefly presented it to the rest of the class.

4/20

• Professor Lima ordered our valve manifold.
• Began to look up information on flow meters to determine the best one for our system, based on factors such as price availability, and precision, and whether or not it can be connected to an external device.
• Searched for ideal rectangular chambers that we could use online as an easier solution to re-creating our own, but could not (yet) find anything.

4/21

• Redesigned the new chamber assembly on SolidWorks.
• Opened up one of the Whatman filters to observe what it was composed of on the inside.

4/22

• Met with Professor Lima today to discuss the SolidWorks design, the filters, and the flow meters.
• Learned what needs to be done between now and the final presentation.
• Attempted to call certain flow meter companies to see what we would go about getting, but as it was late on a Friday, this would have to be postponed until Monday. Instead, found and wrote down phone numbers of some companies that would possibly have what we are looking for to make it easier for when they are called.

4/25

• Met with Professor Lima to discuss next steps in preparing for final presentation.
• Regarding flow meters, learned that combination of high rate of flow and small fill volumes lends to higher possibility of error in measuring flow volume (this applies to us since we only need to fill chambers with ~75 mL); need to search for low rate flow meters.
• Examined split filters; will order filter paper. Filter Pictures
• Determined need to find or design inner mesh, plastic and/or metal container that would allow easy access to graft.

4/28

• Tried to figure out how to get the flow meter in the biomedical lab to accurately pump water in an out of a sample jar. The flow meter was a Masterflex L/S model 7523-40 and the pump attached to it was a Masterflex L/S model 07090-42 PTFE diaphragm pump. Data sheets for these mechanisms are shown as follows:
• |Masterflex L/S Pump Drive
• |Masterflex L/S PTFE Diaphragm Pump

4/29

• Met with Professor Lima to discuss final steps for the project and the presentation.
• Possibility of continuing the project over the summer?
• Continued working on the pump-meter apparatus. Concluded that the pump worked fine once the filter was removed, and that the filter had been building up too much pressure, disrupting the flow of water from the pump to the jar. We are currently not sure where to go from here…
• Added more possible flow meter and pump solutions to the Wiki.
• Need to know what to do with filters next. Can possibly work with Whatman to design a filter solution.