Soda Blast Machining of Parylene
|
|
|
A couple of years ago I was asked to develop a method of cutting the apertures seen in the center photograph. The material was a coating of parylene over a 0.006 platinum wire that was used in a medical sensor that is seen on the right above the dime. I immediately thought of a laser, but the cost of an Excimer laser was too high. However, while reading about parylene and its uses, I found that people often removed the coating with a mask and a soda blast. That was the beginning of the machine on left. The wire was loaded into a hypo tube from the right, across a short gap, and into another tube. It was then clamped in place with a plastic collet. The machine then spun the wire while the two nozzles were moved back and forth over the area not covered by the masks removing the parylene coating.
Photograph Post Processing
|
|
|
This was a machine that I architected for a large inkjet printer company. It was used to finish cut photographs from a commercial photo printer. Once the system design was completed, I went on to be the lead designer of the cutter bay. The printer printed many sizes of photos on several sizes of paper, and in some cases there were two photos on the same sheet. But, in all cases there was white space on all sides of the photos that needed to be removed. Three sheets of photos were received in a burst every 13 seconds. The unit had one fixed cross cutter and one movable cross cuter, and down stream there were two adjustable slitters. This arrangement allowed the slitters to accommodate any width photo placed anywhere on the sheet. For smaller photos the cross cutters were positioned to the photo length and the top and bottom of the photo were cut at once, but for longer photos the cross cutters were set to 6 inches and the lead and trailing edges cut individually.
Autoinjector
|
|
|
The Autoinjector is a recent project of mine, and it is used to self administer an injection. The customer wanted to be able to inject 1 to 30 Cp fluids at syringe velocities of 3mm/s - 30mm/s using a 27 gage 31mm long needle. To meet these requirements, the force on the syringe is in the range of 150 to 200 N. This made the design and selection of the chassis, drive, and battery very challenging. The requirements were met with an FEA tested chassis design using 20% glass filled polycarbonate, a specially wound DC motor, and a Lithium polymer battery.