Group 043-02: Improving electrospinning efficiency

This week a lot of progress was made, which helped make up for last week's delay. Peter was able to contact a major electrospinning apparatus manufacturing company, called NanoFMG. They were contacted, so that our group could see the prices of other electrospinning apparatuses that are on the market. We want our design to, not only better in terms safety of safety and efficiency, but also be cost effective. The prices are listed in Table 1, which was sent to us by NanoFMG.  The price of the cheapest machine they sell that would be suited to our purposes (the Ne200) around $25,000 [1]. 
The total projected expenses for our project should significantly less than prices listed in Figure 1. 

Table 1: This figure represents the costs of different electrospinning apparatuses that the company NanoFMG sells. It is a good indicator of what the prices of other machines on the market are [1].

Kenny was also able to start the beginnings of his part of the final project, which is designing and creating a CAD model of the electrospinning device we want to make for this project. Though it the drawling is still somewhat in it's infancy, it certainly gives a concrete of ida of where we are headed and what we want the machine to roughly look like. This portion of the project is the only physical manifestation of the research and hard work everyone has put into this project, so it should represent everything we have learned through this design process. A picture of the design at this stage is inlaced under Figure 1. 

Figure 1: This picture shows the beginnings of the CAD model for the electrospinning apparatus design that is being worked on further. It gives a rough idea of where of what we are thinking right now and a projection of how we want the final product to work.

The other members of our group have also been working long and hard to find out more information on patents and other important information about the how to go about the rest of our design. Phu and I are looking up more patent information, with the help of Jay Bhatt. Phu is still gathering more information as of right now, and after our meeting tomorrow we should be able to posy some of his findings online. 

[1] NanoFMG. (2012, May 6). Pricing for the NanoSpinner 24 [Web].