Engineering Commons^™

Design Of Natural Rubber Extraction From Tks Dandelion, Jehad S. Alrawajfeh, Trevor Cody, Jason Pogozelski

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

A design was developed for a controlled environment agriculture 3D greenhouse to grow and harvest TKS dandelions, as well as a processing plant to extract natural rubber and inulin from the roots. The design capacity was scaled for both pilot- and full-scale production: 100 and 100,000 tonnes of natural rubber per year, respectively. The byproducts of the process were dandelion greens, inulin, cellulose, and glucose; all of these except for cellulose were able to be valorized. The greenhouse was designed based on existing 3D hydroponic growing environments, and the extraction process was designed based on the original TKS dandelion extraction …

Pitting Corrosion Of 410 Stainless Steel In Hcl Solutions, Paul D. Krell

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

410 stainless steel (SS) is a material used in HCl services, such as distillation column trays in oil refineries. Unlike other alloys, however, the oil refining industry lacks a good reference for the corrosion rate of 410 SS at the varying HCl concentrations and temperatures the material might experience as trays in crude unit distillation columns. The goal of this project is to fill that knowledge gap. The corrosion behavior of 410 SS in HCl environments of pH 0.50, 1.25, 2.25, 3.25, and 4.25 at temperatures of 38, 52, 79, and 93°C was investigated using several methods. Cyclic potentiodynamic polarization …

Rubber Additives To Concrete Specimens, Kendall J. Sweitzer, Mary Mccannon

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Rubber, as an additive to concrete, would hypothetically cause a concrete specimen to take on some mechanical characteristics of the rubber to a certain degree. In particular, the concrete’s durability should increase when exposed to fluctuating temperature conditions due to the rubber additive. This experiment sets out to test crumb rubber as a concrete additive, cured under various atmospheric conditions. The effects shall be measured via a simple concrete compression test.

Unfortunately, several errors took place during experimental process that led to inconclusive results. However, it can be reasonably considered from testing Matrix One that the addition of crumb rubber …

Design And Testing Of Flexible Lithium-Ion Batteries, Ryan C. Kramanak, Matt A. Murrow, Matt Stolfer, Jered Tyler, Aaron Moser

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The goal of this disquisition is to delineate the development of a material and casing suitable for flexible lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. Development of these cells is driven by increasing interest in portable and flexible electronics. The goal is to implement them into items such as smart cards, wearable electronics, novelty packages, flexible displays, and transdermal drug delivery patches. To accomplish this task, a number of individual cathode compounds were explored that used different compositions of lithium cobalt oxide and other compounds. These cells were tested in a generic and easily manufacturable cell casing. After the catholyte compound testing was completed …