Monthly Archives: September 2014

A trip to the laser table.

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Having never worked with acrylic before it has been an interesting challenge to accurately, and tidily cut my materials. The cylinder sections were quite easy to do, requiring only a junior hacksaw and some finishing with sandpaper to get a nice square edge. The flat sheets with the need for true edges suitable for gluing provided more of a challenge.

I tried using a hacksaw which in my hands was too inaccurate and resulted in a wavy line, entirely unsuitable for bonding to the face of another sheet.
I next tried to score and snap the sheets, but again this gave a poor finish, and sometimes causes a “step” profile in the edge. My final DIY attempt was to use a fine toothed bandsaw; this gave a truer edge but caused too much chipping of the edges, even when I tried protecting them with tape.

My final solution was to reach out to the Faculty of Arts and Creative Technologies to see what solutions they had. To my delight they have 2 laser cutting tables, 1 of which was suitable for my needs, available to hire. This was the perfect solution, guaranteeing straight cuts with a great finish – ready to glue.

Flight chamber design is now finalised.

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Following a number of different design versions I am pleased to have settled on a final version that is going forward to prototyping.

The biggest, most obvious, change is the size of the flight chamber. This is significantly reduced in cross sectional area in response to the computational fluid dynamic work that has been carried-out. The reduced area leads to a reduction of required air volume needed to generate the flow rate and means that I can use the same unit for both static air testing and dynamic wind tunnel like tests.

In the static air tests the mosquitoes are loaded as normal, as are the variables ( or variable and control). However, no air supply will be attached. Testing with no air flow will allow me to test whether the odours from the variables is enough to cause the mosquitoes to investigate them without other ‘activators’. These tests will typically run overnight, and require a slight, removable, modification to the mosquito traps to prevent exit once a ‘decision’ has been made.

The dynamic, or wind tunnel, tests are typically much quicker, and can occur in a few seconds to minutes. There are different assumptions made of these types of tests than in the static air test, as a method it is equally applicable to my study. It is my plan to use both methods in conjunction to develop as complete a representation of behaviour as possible.