S2 WEEK 6

3/13-3/19

Project Status: 

We met with Dr. Felder in person on Sunday to talk about barb designs in more detail. We showed him our preliminary barbs that we had printed and compared them to the prototypes that he had gotten professional companies to make. We adjusted the dimensions of our designs to match the pre-printed ones. Hayden and Lucas printed out several copies of each design for testing. On Wednesday, we used the tensometer and a pig abdomen to compare the tensile strength of each barb design. Although we ran into some issues with the testing protocol (like the barb head snapping off under pressure and the barbs being difficult to insert into the muscle), we got enough information to help us narrow down our design. Additionally, we put Dr. Felder and Keith Vollmar (sling health contact) in touch to deal with NDA issues so that we can look into laser microprinting as a potential production technique. 

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Next Steps:

We need to quantitatively analyze the data we obtained and use it to make decisions regarding the next steps for testing. Since we now know how to print and have a better idea of what bench testing might look like, we hope these next iterations of the design will go by faster.