Week 7 - Brinkley

 This week was shakedowns, bench top testing, and more shakedown designs. Our materials all hadn't come for some of our shakedowns, so we focused on our bench top testing to begin, then we designed more shakedowns. 

BenchTop Testing

Our bench top testing is done on the Ahmed valve to see how it preforms when we can control the flow, resistance, and pressure. We had to create an encasing for the Ahmed to simulate fibrosis and add it to our bench test. Here are a few pictures of Kierstin and I working on the setup, and get the flow sensor to work in our system. Fady is working on the pressure sensors, so we will be able to execute this bench top testing on Wednesday during class time. This set up took so long because we had to find supplies in Dr. Rickard's lab that we could experiment with and see if they would fit in our set up. 


ShakeDown #1

The first shakedown we were able to do with the supplies we had was seeing how water flowed through a tube when it was partially blocked with different size "blebs". Using stretching tubing, and various size caps in the lab we were able to simulate this. We put a syringe on one end of the tube, and filled it with water, applying pressure. We saw that even if the cap was pretty tight, some water was able to slow through when given enough pressure. This will help us moving forward in our design. 

TM for another shakedown: 

Below I have attached exactly how we are going to test the dissolving component, and the known dissolving constant of catgut. Through out this semester we are going to see if we can measure how quickly are various dissolvable sutures disappear. 




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