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Department of Materials Science and Engineering Publications

Laser welding

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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Design Optimization Of Polymer Heat Exchanger For Automated Household-Scale Solar Water Pasteurizer, David C. Denkenberger, Joshua M. Pearce Apr 2018

Design Optimization Of Polymer Heat Exchanger For Automated Household-Scale Solar Water Pasteurizer, David C. Denkenberger, Joshua M. Pearce

Department of Materials Science and Engineering Publications

A promising approach to reducing the >870,000 deaths/year globally from unsafe water is flow-through solar water pasteurization systems (SWPs). Unfortunately, demonstrated systems have high capital costs, which limits access for the poor. The most expensive component of such systems is the heat exchanger (HX). Thus, this study focuses on cost optimization of HX designs for flow-through SWPs using high-effectiveness polymer microchannel HXs. The theoretical foundation for the cost optimization of a polymer microchannel HX is provided, and outputs are plotted in order to provide guidelines for designers to perform HX optimizations. These plots are used in two case studies: (1) …


Open Source Laser Polymer Welding System: Design And Characterization Of Linear Low-Density Polyethylene Multilayer Welds, John Laureto, Serguei V. Dessiatoun, Michael M. Ohadi, Joshua M. Pearce Jul 2016

Open Source Laser Polymer Welding System: Design And Characterization Of Linear Low-Density Polyethylene Multilayer Welds, John Laureto, Serguei V. Dessiatoun, Michael M. Ohadi, Joshua M. Pearce

Department of Materials Science and Engineering Publications

The use of lasers to weld polymer sheets provides a means of highly-adaptive and custom additive manufacturing for a wide array of industrial, medical, and end user/consumer applications. This paper provides an open source design for a laser polymer welding system, which can be fabricated with low-cost fused filament fabrication and off-the-shelf mechanical and electrical parts. The system is controlled with free and open source software and firmware. The operation of the machine is validated and the performance of the system is quantified for the mechanical properties (peak load) and weld width of linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) lap welds …