Blog 7- G10
Blog 7 Between March 9th and March 23rd, the team mainly focused on machining the casted prototype. The cast had some imperfections due to air pockets forming which ended up creating holes. These holes were mostly concentrated in a small area in the fins shown in Figure 1. The team believes that the holes would not substantially affect the functionality of the device other than a minor decrease in thermal performance. The team could redo the cast and make another prototype but a minor loss in thermal performance is not worth the time to recast the prototype. Figure 1. Holes on one side of the cast. After the team decided to keep the cast, the fins were machined. The fins were made slightly thicker than originally planned to reduce the chance of them breaking since the holes had already weakened the structure. Based on the heat transfer calculations from semester one, the new fin design still provides enough cooling to prevent overheating. Figure 2 shows the current machining progress ...