Week 6 (Outside Lab) - Fluid Transfer Research Pt. 1

After the success of the last meeting, the team began to move forward towards a more complete assembly of the PlantParent parts. The next problem to tackle is the layout and connections of the plastic tubing, which will be inserted into the pump's output hole at one end, and split into two outputs with a plastic tee at the other - this configuration can be seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Plastic tee with tubing inserted

The biggest complication arising from this part of the project is the reality of changing flow rate: the pump supplies an initial flow rate of 180 mL/s (approximately 6 ms/mL), but after traveling a certain distance through the tubing - plus splitting into two paths - the flow rate at the plant end is definitely going to be smaller than it is initially. The team began to do some research to see if we can accurately calculate what this final flow rate will be, so that it can be applied to the time-to-amount calculations in the Arduino code.