One Week!

Good Evening!

Matt here again for the OAVS Capstone Team to update everyone on what we've been up to this past week!  With Maine Day a week away we've been a a busy group for sure.    Our first donated can has been tested and testing has started on our second catch can.  We have 4 donated catch cans plus our own design to test on our flow bench.  We've also spent more than a couple of hours working on our PowerPoint presentation for Maine Day (follow this link to learn more about what Maine Day is).  On top of what it says on the page that link sent you to, Maine Day is the day when all of the MET seniors will be presenting their capstones.  So if you'd like to come and see in person what our team has been up to all year save the date on May 1st!

 As I mentioned earlier we still need to build our own catch can design.  Well as I type this Forest is out in the shop working on our very own catch can design.  For our can we went with a design that we hadn't seen in any of our donated cans.  Most of the catch cans that we've seen use some kind of filter media to pull oil out of the PCV line by impingement.  For our can we decided to go with a cyclone design.  The basic principal of this can is that we introduce the air tangentially into the cyclone chamber of the can, and in turn the heavier particles will be thrown to the outside walls of the can and drip down into the reservoir at the bottom.  This is a vastly different route than our donated cans have gone for oil removal and we're hoping it pays off!!!

Troubleshooting and our Next Log Book

Hello again!

It's Matt here from the OAVS group to update you on what we've been doing lately.  Since our last blog post our team has been going steady trying to get ready for our final presentation of our project on Maine Day.  The whole team has been doing at least some form of CAD work.  Jon has finished the electrical schematic of our DAQ, and we've updated the 3D models of the DAQ and the flow bench.  We've also done a large amount of troubleshooting with the flow bench trying to get everything ready to get some data from cans.  We've now got an inline tap for a pressure sensor that will be hooked up downstream from our catch can so that we'll be able to take the differential pressure caused by the catch can.  We've also created a catch tank to hold all the oil that actually makes it through our catch can models, or as Forest so eloquently put it "a catch can to catch what our catch can can't catch".  The print package for our own catch can is printed off and being turned in with our current log book as well.

We've run into several hiccups in getting ready to test the cans.  Our flow sensor ended up getting saturated with our test fluid.  Even after drying the sensor out and Forest taking the sensor home to bake it, the sensor still wouldn't work.  Yesterday while also working on our log book the team got together and worked on troubleshooting reasons we weren't getting signal out from one of our sensors.  This lead us to finding a broken wire in part of the wiring harness for the DAQ.

As far as web presence is concerned our University of Maine page has 850+ views at this point, we're hoping we'll see 1,000 views before Maine Day.  Our blog has approximately 670 views, and hopefully we'll see more now that the blogs design is looking a little more crisp and looks more professional than it has in the past.  If any of our reader's want to see Youtube videos of what we've been up to, you should check that out on our University of Maine webpage.

If you guys like what we're doing leave a comment on some of the posts, or if you're on Google+, +1 us and share our posts with your friends who might be interested in seeing what seniors at the University of Maine can do!

Until next Time!