Fluid in Motion
Our group's final submission.
For this project, we had to create a solution that could transfer soap from a bottle to an end container, with a few constraints. Those included having the soap bottle being at the same height as the end container, a physical obstacle between both containers, and a set quota of fluid transferred.
My group decided on the cheapest option possible, which was a clamp that applied pressure to the soap, which made it flow through a tube towards the end. It wasn't the most effective, but it still was funcitonal.
Design Process
As part of the usual engineering process to solving a problem, we had a few sketches made.
First Ideas + Sketches
We sorted out the basics (potential equations to be used, tools and who'd get them, price tag) on our first sketch.
Sketch 1: For one of our initial solutions, we were going to put the soap on top of some kind of stand, and let it flow downwards into the container with gravity and a ramp
(note that the red arrows indicate flow direction). We ditched this design, considering the new limitation of the soap bottle being on the same height as the end container
would make sure that only a portion of the soap (anything above the outflow hole) is guaranteed to flow.
Sketch 2: Because of our new limit, we moved from using gravity-powered flow to a more reasonable pressure-based design. In this sketch, we wanted to compress the soap bottle with a
huge weight. The pressure on the bottle due to decreasing volume would then force the soap out into the pipe, and to the end. This design was scrapped because we couldn't find anything heavy enough to serve as the compressing mass.
Sketch 3 (Chosen): For this design, we improved on the pressure method from Sketch 2. This time, the compressing force would be a huge clamp that would be compressed to provide the pressure force. This would force the soap upwards,
and into the endpoint. The straw pipe would also be glued at key points to make sure it was stable enough to handle the flow.
Conclusions
We went with Sketch 3 as the final design, as we had all the materials available and saw this as our best idea overall.
Did it work? Yes, but not all of the soap flowed through to the final container.
What could've made this better? To reach our quota of flowing soap, a very simple fix was to add more pressure to the bottle, either by tightening the clamp further or bringing in a more effective mechanism.
Did it work? Yes, but not all of the soap flowed through to the final container.
What could've made this better? To reach our quota of flowing soap, a very simple fix was to add more pressure to the bottle, either by tightening the clamp further or bringing in a more effective mechanism.