Hey hey! I’ve got a few different projects in the works at the moment, but none at a good point to share detailed info on them. But I’m pretty excited about em, so I thought I’d hop on here and give a little rundown of what I’ve currently got cookin.
The idea with this project is to build a thermal actuator. The operating principle is based on the density change in paraffin wax as it changes from solid to liquid phase. Over the phase change, the wax’s density changes by up to 15% (density lowering in the liquid phase). So by controlling the temperature of the wax, you can control the density. That density change manifests physically as expansion and contraction, so all I need to do is harness the volumetric change of my wax to drive a linear actuator. (ignore the check valve shown below, that was an oopsie)
So for my build, I’m going to have the wax in direct contact with a working fluid. The reservoir holding that working fluid is connected to a 1mL syringe. As the wax expands, it displaces the working fluid from the reservoir and drives the syringe plunger…or that’s the idea, we shall see :)
I’m expecting the resulting actuator to be extremely slow (on the order of minutes for full stroke), but extremely high blocking force.
At the heart of the project is the heat exchanger/reservoir block. It’s going to be an aluminum part, and such a huge thanks to Husky Machining for working with me on these!
The array of holes will be filled with the wax, and the wax being in all those holes is intended to help with heat transfer into the poor-conducting wax.
On the back side of that array of holes is the interface to the Peltier. This will give me the ability to drive heat both in and out of the wax.
I’ll share more on it as it comes along!
This one is a big, and long term one. The ultimate goal is a 4-axis camera robot, with the base (X) axis being made from the 1.2 meter linear bearings I picked up at auction recently. I’m aiming for the Z travel to be comparable, and then two rotation axes for Pan and Tilt of the camera…I’m also VERY seriously tossing in a 3rd rotation axis to allow automated swap from landscape to portrait, but I ALMOST feel like that might be a bridge too far. The below image is from one of the kinematics concept models I put together to play around with.
And here was another
And here’s what I’m now actually working on
