Engineering 101/102 Project: Isopropyl Alcohol-Resin Wash System
Over the course of my first year at Duke, I worked with a team of 3 other first-year engineers to develop a device that efficiently purifies and recycles Isopropyl Alcohol (IPA) from the resin waste produced by SLA 3D printing. Our client was BlurPD, a medical device product development company that heavily utilizes SLA printing for rapid prototyping.
After a part is printed from an SLA printer, it is then washed in an IPA bath to clean excess/uncured resin. Over time, the IPA becomes saturated with resin and needs to be disposed of in a costly (financially and environmentally) waste management process. We were tasked with developing a solution that allows the user to recycle the IPA rather than dispose of it – reducing costs, labor, and environmental impact. We designed an automatic distillation system that, with the press of a button, purifies over 60% of the IPA from the resin waste to be reused to clean parts.
The device consisted of a heating element, distillation chamber, condensing system, and emergency pressure-safety valve all controlled by an Arduino microcontroller. I was responsible for ensuring all components were integrated properly and functioned as intended. The greatest challenge was designing a powerful enough condensing system to cool the gaseous IPA. I reached out to a heat and mass transfer professor for help, who advised me in developing an external water tank and radiator-fan system to improve cooling.
After a year of testing, iterating, and improving the device, we delivered it to the Duke Innovation Co-Lab, the largest 3D-printing lab on campus. This was the first engineering project I had taken from start to finish through the entire engineering design process, and it was an invaluable learning experience.
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