Mini Salt Factory
Mini Salt Factory is an interactive chemical engineering learning tool.
Recognizing the lack of learning materials of chemical engineering, I made Mini Salt Factory as my final project of Fab Academy 2020.
I combined my knowledge on chemical engineering with my understanding of children’s learning processes, and digital fabrication skills to make this project. You can check out the documentation here.
My journey at Fab Academy was documented here.
Mini Salt Factory distillates ocean water to make salt and pure water.
With the control panel, user can change the heating temperature and reaction time of distillation,to see how those effect the salt production.
It demonstrated various digital fabrication skills I possess, mostly acquired at Fab Academy.
Mini Salt Factory is controlled with an MCU board with ATMEGA328 chip.The MCU board was milled with CNC machine. It contains multiple input and output functions, programmed with Arduino IDE.
| INPUT/OUTPUT DEVICES | FUNCTION |
|---|---|
| Tact switches | Change the settings of parameters, turn devices on and off |
| Thermistor | Monitor the temperature of distillation tower for heat hysteresis control |
| Solid state relays | Control the on/off of heaters |
| LED matrix | Represent the change in parameters, on/off status of devices. |
| DC motor | Control the on/off of peristaltic pump |
| Solenoid valve | Control the on/off of flow outlet |
The entire fabrication process was documented here.
The project was featured on the highlight reel of Fab Academy 2020 at Fabx Live.
It was also exhibited at Maker Faire Tokyo 2020.
