User:Chong Tian Lin/ENES-100/Project 0

My Instructor's course page which points to this.

Project Preference
At the start, each person in the team was given a mysterious bag of tiny beads. There wasn't much choice of topic as that was our only material at our disposal.

Problem Statement
Our problem was to create a solution for transporting a quarter cup of water with only a bag of tiny plastic beads that we've never identified before. By following the CDIO, we will need to brainstorm ideas of how the beads can be helpful in carrying water and possibly research the characteristics that is present on them. With these resources, we will be able to choose an optimal and cost-effective design to follow through and demonstrate our solution.

Week 1 Narrative
In the first week, I came up with initial ideas of transporting water without researching the features that the beads contained. Some of them included occupying volume underneath the water in order to overflow the container and melting the beads in order to mold them into a scooping utility. After the researching procedure, I became aware of its water-absorbing properties through this merchandising websiteː http://www.gemjan-waterbeads4u.co.uk/water_beads.php. Nevertheless, I was still worried that the capacity of such tiny beads would not be enough to hold water several times its size. This lead me to limiting the water at a quarter of a cup and dumping all the beads inside.

Creating beads to their max capacity(15mm diameter) will greatly reduce the number of beads needed to transport water since each bead will carry almost twice the water than its 8mm diameter counterpart.

Volume of sphere=(4/3)πr³

Volume of 15mm diameter bead=(4/3)π(7.5mm)³=562.5π mm³

Volume of 1/4 cup water=59,147.0591 mm³

Estimate minimum number of 15mm beads needed to transport 1/4 cup water=59,147.0591/562.5π=33.47 or 34 beads

What I could refine in the next steps

 * Control the room/water temperature
 * Cover the cup with a lid to minimize water loss due to evaporation
 * Subtract the original bead(polymer) volume from each "volume of 15mm diameter bead" in calculations
 * Use the number of beads from the resulting theoretical calculation to see if it is able to transport the 1/4 cup of water.