Progress Report, Week 7: March 21st

Due to schedule conflicts, we met with Dr. Liu on Wednesday and discussed the general progress we have made since the last meeting. We brought in our prototype in order to better convey the difficulties we have had with the design. From this meeting, we gleaned that it is in our best interest to make the device disposable and to seal the diaphragm to the housing permanently. Notably, this is not a vacuum seal as the second/upper membrane will likely be low density polyethylene (LDPE) and will not maintain its conformation. Dr. Liu offered his UV curing glue for our purposes, which we used on Friday during class time. Although we were able to successfully join the two pieces after a great amount of UV light exposure, the outside remained "sticky" and under the advice of Steve Leigh, we left our device over the weekend in the lab. We will pick it up prior to class on Monday to see if this has changed.

In addition, we were given the opportunity to participate in the URECA research symposium on April 27th and the abstract deadline is on Monday, March 28th. We have written the abstract; had it approved by our faculty advisor, Dr. Hadjiargyrou; emailed it to the URECA coordinator, Karen Kernen; and handed in the participation form. It will be placed under our design tab.

Jibril Ashiru-Balogun & Ada Tsoi