Light Pipes - Week in review

After being placed on the seasonal/light/rotating team I was a little conflicted. While I wasn't too ecstatic about our constraints or the current state of the project there was something that captured my attention. For the first time in Smart Surfaces there was a high value problem worth tackling: security. Specifically, an issue that was brought up in class was that the solar panels were being taken from the roof of the power house. If the panels are gone there is no way to generate electricity and the house won't function. We toyed with a number of ideas and one solution was to place the panels indoors and pipe the light to them using fiber optic cable. Max was kind enough to let me borrow a cable and a few prisms to work on concentrating the light. 

Optic cables are so cool!

The one I was able to borrow was a singular fiber much thicker in diameter. But all optics functions the same way; the lights enters and keeps getting reflected internally until it reaches the other end and transmits out. Depending on how much you are willing to shell out the efficiencies can be anywhere from 70-99+ %. Using the borrowed cable I built a "black box" (though cardboard and not at all black) which contains a solar cell closed off from the light with the exception of what's provided by the optical cable. The solar cell is hooked up to an LED and if enough light is concentrated into the exposed end of the cable then the light will be powered. 

 

I was having a little trouble concentrating the light directly into the fiber before I had an idea. I looking into building a concentrator out of mirrors but the complexity of the project would have been too time consuming. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flashlight... As I've learned in this class why create when you can borrow. I took apart the flashlight and used the mirrors inside to direct enough white light into the cable and power the LED. Don't worry, I put the flashlight back together and it still works! It was a crazy week with a lot of outside the box (no pun intended! :) thinking but my proof of concept functioned and my team progressed the idea forward. Another successful week in Smart Surfaces, with a trip to the botanical gardens (and pictures!) to come.

Crossing Boundaries

An interesting concept was mentioned this week in class. In the U.S. we think of a boundary as a line where things end, something that you don't want to cross. In basketball or soccer if you go out of bounds you are penalized by giving the ball to the other team. However, in Greek the definition of a boundary is a beginning. Instead of thinking of crossing boundaries as stepping out of your comfort zone, it can be thought of as stepping into a realm of knowledge to be gained. This week I really tried to consider that concept and focus not so much on the engineering side of things but more on the aesthetics and end result of the product. It was certainly a new way to approach the project and one I very much enjoyed. I didn't focus solely on finding the cheapest, strongest materials - they also had to look good and mesh with the overall design. I enjoyed this fresh perspective and will certainly consider boundaries to be more fluid and crossable in the future.

Imitation Is The Highest Form Of Flattery

Week 2 started off with a bit of a surprise for me. I was expecting to completely switch gears and jump into a new project but I was assigned to stick with the water/hourly/folding project. The direction of it seemed to be heading towards a dead end but the new set of people really reenergized the project and were able to shed some light on areas of improvement. The excess water use turned into a garden, which became the surface, and eventually turned into a green wall. After a lengthy, and sometimes intense, discussion there was a concept which emerged and really caught my attention: biomimicry. Imitating tried and true methods from nature could save us the trouble of having to start from scratch. I looked for cool examples of nature interacting with water and two things caught my eye - the Lotus Effect and the Stenocara Beetle from the Namib Desert in Africa. This beetle is able to survive in one of the most arid landscapes in the world with its unique shape. Its bumpy back allows dew to condense on it and a waxy coating sends the droplets down the troughs to its mouth.

This waxy coating is quite similar to the Lotus effect and got me thinking about superhydrophobic materials. With such a small amount of the water actually touching the surface, water flows much more freely. 

Combine these principles with a few wisely placed gates and you can allow or restrict the flow of water all over the surface. When you're making a green wall, the amount of water each plant is getting can be quite critical. Over do it and they drown, under do it and they won't grow, so smartly delivering the water can optimize the crop yield. The issue of folding still prevented me from using this as inspiration for the surface, however when you use the geological definition of folding: when one or a stack of originally flat or planar surfaces are bent or curved as a result of deformation, the project opened up to numerous possibilities. I set off to work to learn Maya or some other 3D modeling software but the time investment was going to be too much to model this complex of a surface so quickly. I did learn that the fluid modeling package with it is quite extensive and could be useful in the future if we go that direction. Since my group is meeting later tonight to discuss ideas a rough prototype should suffice. A little bit of chip board and duct tape can do pretty much anything:

Why reinvent the wheel when nature has already done so? After all, imitation is the highest form of flattery.

Week 1 in Review

I never thought I would be doing origami for an engineering course. Then again, MSE 493 (Smart Surfaces) is not a typical engineering course. The intense multidisciplinary projects are unlike anything I've encountered before, and with such a high concentration of talented individuals working in conjunction the bar has to be raised. At first it was slightly overwhelming, but after the initial shock wore off and we were able to think, regroup, and prepare my team came back with well thought out ideas and propositions. When we were first tasked with designing a smart surface that deals with folding and water on an hourly time scale I was stumped. How can water be folded? It's liquid, by nature it will fill whatever container you put it in. That's where the origami comes in - the art of folding paper (or acrylic, nylon, rubber, or any material) into shapes and figures can come in handy when designing a container to store water. Being the enginnerd I am I thought how best to tackle the problem; I used the most powerful tool I had at my disposal - google. A quick search returned these nifty inflatable boxes that start in 2D and can expand to hold sizable volume. Conveniently named origami water balloons, I had seen these in action before and set about the step by step example of making them:

My team liked the idea, it had come up in discussion previously but having that visual was key. When we all came back for our second meeting the discussion was flowing much better as everyone had plenty of ideas to add and discuss. We had an intense brainstorming session resulting in the whiteboard seen below:

With the wheels turning and everyone drawing similar conclusions as how to best tackle this problem we hashed some real tangible ideas and drawings out. I'm excited to share what we came up with and see the other teams progress on Tuesday!