January 29-February 5, 2018

This week, the Power Puff Girls mainly worked on coming up with a design for the re-circulation device. In doing so, a better design for the overall apparatus was developed. In the previous blog, you can see the details for the device itself. The basis behind making the design can bee seen in the brainstorming represented in Figure 1.

Figure 1: An image of the brainstorming board from January 29, 2018.

Starting from the left, there is a list of ideas for re-circulation along with pros and cons for each. The bottom of the whiteboard shows the important factors that the device MUST accomplish. The ideas were then placed under each to see which idea was able to complete the needed task. In the center is a schematic of what the entire project needs to do. It is important that there is not too much blood outside of the body at a given time. The design is set up so that the maximum volume of blood outside the body is 1 pint. This value was determined from the fact that 1 pint is what is removed from the body during a blood donation. This volume will guarantee that the patient will not lose any extreme amounts of blood. Lastly, on the right, there is the initial drawing of the new design for the re-circulation device. 

This week, the girls will be putting together parts and developing an Arduino code that will run the re-circulation device. Once this is accomplished, testing will resume and data will be given in future posts.