Alan Wang, UCSF Week 4-5

Hey everyone,

These past two weeks have been really exciting. I first tried to tackle the random fiber assortment problem by creating a tubesheet design that could be made with the “Othermill” CNC Mill that we have on site at my lab. What’s cool about this mill isn’t just the name, but the fact that the smallest drill bit it accepts is 1/100 of an inch wide at the very tip. This is about a quarter of a millimeter (or 254 microns if you want to sound fancy).

Eric, who works the shop, showed me how to set everything up with the Othermill. I actually breezed through most of the CAD/CAM part, thanks to my experience with Peddie Robotics. The entire machine is about the size of a cubic foot, which is extremely small compared to the behemoth Haas mill that we have back at Peddie. I first milled this cool honeycomb pattern of holes into the back of a plastic petri dish. Ideally, the honeycomb pattern will keep the fibers in an even order with a uniform diffusion radius between each hole, which will hopefully help with the current design challenges.

Only after spending a couple days perfecting the plastic tubesheet/fiber-holder, I realized that pushing 36 of the 200-micron wide fibers through rigid plastic holes wouldn’t be the greatest idea for manufacturing efficiency. Since the fibers are so small and fragile, I had to use tweezers to push them through the tubesheet holes underneath a microscope, which turned out to be both extremely tedious. Even worse, I found out after potting and epoxying the fibers that the epoxy had climbed up the fibers towards the center of the units, meaning that the tubesheet design was probably a wash.

Back to the drawing board, but hopefully with some better results next week!

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