BLOG entry 7

 

Hello my beloved viewers!

 I am BACK with another BLOG. YES it is my 7th blog now and I will make sure it is one of the very best that I make. I hate to bring it to you guys but this will be my last blog of this semester😭😭. However fret not as I  will be doing a super blog this time round:) Don't know what that is right...?? WELL, stick around and find out😊.

To be very honest school has been tough lately, having modules JAMMED PACK like a can of sardines I really did struggle staying sane for some moments. However I am super grateful that I have amazing, talented, kind and brilliant classmate that cheered me on and went through school with me, hence despite my school days feeling like eternity, the memories are truly the one I brought home with me.

This last blog I want to share my personal journey with all of you and hope you can get enlightened by my work💪. My teacher has explained that if our product is feasible enough we maaay be able to market and sell it hence let me give it a try in explaining our design! 

So, starting off we have some content I will share in chronological order:

1. PAIN points

2. literature reviews📚😵

3. SCAMPER💡

4. Feasibility analysis💰

5. COWS 🐮

6. Operating principles⚙️

7. Design specifications & Prototyping🧠

SO lets get this bread(started)!!!

1.Pain points? what are thoseee?

These pain point don't stand for those points where you have muscle aches. They are actually problems we face! My team has identified the problem of 🌟sustainability🌟.

From many talks in our secondary and tertiary education the importance of sustainability has been latched into our brains and so we decided to tackle the problem head on. 

As a student from double pure science stream I have been exposed to many insights in world pollution when studying chemicals⚗️. I remembered a very impactful study we did on Green House Gas (GHG). GHG includes many gases that are able to trap excessive heat!

This includes gases like carbon dioxide (C02) as well as Methane (CH4). This gases are used to trap heat from the sun but as humans has emitted TOO MUCH of them they are trapping TOO MUCH heat! These gases are generated in a great variety of waste be it humongous chemical plants, cars and even agriculture and cattle ranching! This is the spark🔥 to our project design. We found out that cattle ranching is a BIG deciding factor in the contribution of GHGs! 

Fun-fact!: did you know that cattle ranching itself produces 7.1 GIGATONNES of GHG per annum? It accounts for  ALMOST 15% of the GHG produced annually😱. In addition, the C02 emission from deforestation for cattle ranching is yet to be accounted for☠️.

Okay so we have established that cattle ranching and the consumption of meat is generating a huge portion of GHG emission... what now🤔. 

2. literature reviews📚😵

Here comes our researching part. During this time my team and I were absolutely blown away by how much data was in for plant-base meat production and alternative to poultry.

We had a total of 5 review, but in my opinion they were waaay more than sufficient.

There were many findings that acted as a pillar of support for our chemical product design ideas and I am very excited to share 3 of our top findings!

First literature review was about all the reasons why people eat meat. It is so interesting that meat are eaten for their texture when they are on the tongue as most people feel the "addiction" for the sensory properties provided by meat👅. Many believe that there are no alternative for these properties such as texture colour and flavour👄.

Next was on a research done in a restaurant! It was a research to implement a framework of healthy eating to the guest by giving them a little "nudge". This was achieved by changing the default meat to plant-based meat in the menu provided. (very smart idea I would like to say). Results came out and it was truly quite fascinating. Many customers actually were fine with eating plant base meat despite paying for the same price and most of these customers acknowledged that they know the impact of consuming meat! 

Lastly, it was about a poster on 🥩"beyond meat"🍖. It was super insightful and gave us many interesting discoveries. Plants are just bewildering I must say. There is a myriad of different vegetables out there to try and there are some that can be added to seitan to provide protein and fat that resemble meat. They are customizable such that they have the same amount of PROTEIN but with NO CHOLESTROL🤯. They are so customizable that you can add the nutrients and fibers according to your own needs.

3. SCAMPER💡

Our ideation part was accomplish with our very good friend scamper:

Substitute
Combine
Adapt
Modify
Put to another use
Eliminate
Reverse

With these acronym as our starter-pack-special we came up with some exquisite ideas😙

some cool ideas eh? 

We got these potential ideas also from the internet and my team members were task to find at least one idea they think might be doable which brings me to my next part!

4. Feasibility analysis💰

Another word for idea screening. This is the part where we filter our ideas to find out whether it is feasible/doable with our limitations such as: is our current technology able to carry out this plan, or are we able to do this within our budget. 

Luckily we were provided with a template by the school and were able to quickly identify which ideas were viable and which were impractical.

5. COWS 🐮

Another good friend of mine! let me introduce you to cow!

His name is Billy the cow! please say hi when you see him!

Anyways Billy has been super useful in deciding some important criterions to be used for comparison. In case you didn't know Billy actually offered to use his name as an acronym just for us to remember his method easily

Criteria

Options

Weightage

Score

So, thanks to Billy our work has been more effective and less wearying for us so thank you Billy!💜

In a nutshell🌰,

By using Billy's method, we have chosen the 3rd idea to devise a machine that kneads or ferment wheat flour to create seitan which is our substitute to meat. We chose idea 3 as it has a higher score of (170) as compared to idea 2 (165). With this finally established, we can move on to our prototypings!!

OH WAIT not so fast heheheh😈. We have to identify some key principles to our chemical product. Afterall we are in a chemical engineering module so why not put these engineering knowledge to good use.

6. Operating principles⚙️

Firstly we have🔥 heat transfer principle. 🔥

There are three types of heat transfer, one through fluid, one through solid and last without a medium.

1. With air it is called convection as the heating element is usually located at the bottom the

heated fluid rises as it expands and decrease in density, the colder fluid falls. This recirculation allow convection currents to occur and hence slow heats up the entire body of fluid.

2. We have solid heat transfer. This is often referred as heating via conduction where molecules vibrates and collide with each other converting kinetic energy to heat energy. This is the fastest way conduct heat transfer as molecules are vibrating at a super high speed.

3. We have radiation. This mode of heat transfer do not require a medium to pass through as it heats up using electromagnetic waves (EM) which includes microwaves, radio waves and infared etc.

We used heat transfer via conduction in our machine design as it was the fastest and easiest to control and  carry out.

Secondly we have agitation and mixing!

This was also a principle we have learnt from chemical engineering at the start of the course in year 1! We implemented this idea into our chemical product by using a motor box connected to a stirrer to mix all ingredients up homogenously. This is done at the top part of the machine.

Lastly we identified our chemical product to be a machine that does batch products. This means that ingredients are measured in a certain quantity and put together to make a product. This product is then yield and retrieved in one go. 

7. Design specifications & Prototyping🧠

My team and I decided to start of with a specification table as the backbone of our design. 

With these we started our sketchings starting with this over here

After learning some more idea input we enhanced our drawing and did this!

Lastly with some of our skills combined and the lessons we learnt we created this!

With the sketchings out of the way we can finally move on to our lonng awaited prototyping.

Prototyping sounds fun and all but the reason may actually shock you as much as it shocked me. Take a look at this picture, It conveys the importance of how success is built upon and how much can be done with prototyping.

With this at the back of our head we started with our project work. Let me just say... I am soooo happy the way it came out! The efforts we made yesterday are our rewards today so let me show u the progress of our prototype.

we started off with some walls cut out according to the dimensions

✀✀✀✀✂✂✂✄✄✄✄✄

made our lil tiny chimmy (chimney)

I was doing the food mould piston 

we made a wise decision of removing one layer of cardboard to make it more flexible as you can see. We allowed the cardboard to flex like never before:0

Ingredients compartments

Middle tray

piston and mould

interior of our beauty product

Where the mixing happens: a stirrer is connected by the motor to allow agitation and mixing with a simple press of a button.

ingredient canister 

⛭⛭GEARRRRRS⛭⛭

contraption/mechanism of the machine

outer view of gear like conveyor we are trying to achieve.

After all of these are put togtherrrr...... drum roll please!!!

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✨✨🎉🎉WE HAVE OUR CHEMICAL PRODUCT!!!🎉🎉✨✨

This is a in-depth video on how this machine actually works, take a look!

And just case it is unavailable you can watch it here

My group and I have actually done a presentation on the parts of our product explaining the detail of each mechanism however, if you have missed it here is a quick glimpse at the presentation details!

8. Product marketing and advantages

hoohoo surprise caught you by surprise there!

Yes I still have more to share about how my team felt that this product will actually make a difference to the society!

 

As mentioned eariler this product is a chemical product that are made to be widely available to consumers hence we have made it portable and lightweight. They are also compact and durable as we used a mixture of different materials strong and more resistant material for the always used areas and lighter and cheaper materials for the less used areas. We also made this product highly customizable to suit every consumers needs. This was implemented as we took a feedback of a literature review that showed that people are willing and eager to try alternative sources of "meat" due to them being more customizable and without cholestrol.

This made a big part of our machine. Lastly this delightful machine is super simple to use!

Step 1: 

• Colouring and flavouring such as soy sauce, beetroot powder, olive oil, salt etc will be put into one compartment. Consumers can customise the colouring and flavouring to their liking

Step 2: 

• Dispenses the ingredients in its appropriate ratio into the mixer 

• Turns on the heater 

• Activates the mixer once the ingredients are introduced

Step 4:

• Drops the dough into the 2nd compartment

Step 5: 

• Compresses the dough into a meat shape

• Cooks the dough

So that is it! You have come to the end of my blog. Really hope you had fun going through this journey with me and learn some things. Until next time, SEE YOU GUYS