Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Design And Testing Of An Open Source Vacuum Oven For Research, Community Recycling, And Additive Manufacturing, Benjamin R. Hubbard

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

To aid the continuing growth of open source tools in the research community, this thesis presents two broadly useful instruments which can be built and operated for a fraction of the cost of equivalent or inferior commercial products. The first device is a digitally-replicable scale, which provides a single framework for making measurements on the order of milligrams all the way up to tens of kilograms by supporting multiple types of load cells. The second device is a vacuum oven, which is validated using the first. The open source vacuum oven facilitates the dehydration of materials at low temperature, providing …