Getting Organized and Developing Our Project Scope

Since our last blog post, JAMS has started to formulate a project plan. Our project plan draft consists of five milestones with several tasks under each milestone. Our first milestone (Project Scope Defined) will help our team steer our project into the right direction and give us a clear goal to follow throughout Capstone I and II. Our first blog post embodies our start to this milestone as we got the chance to become more familiar with NASA's LSG (Life Sciences Glovebox).

We had plans to consult a project lead on the LSG with questions who would have helped us clearly define the problem and developing a proper solution. Unfortunately, we were told we could no longer receive information about the LSG as any further information was considered proprietary. After news of this, our team decided to still move forward with the project and develop flexible physical parameters based on observations, research, and assumptions. The LSG will now mainly be an example to inform us on creating a glove and sleeve fastening mechanism for a more generic glovebox which we will define ourselves. A laboratory glovebox by Ossila (left) is illustrated next to NASA's LSG (right) in order to visualize the impact of shifting to a more generic glovebox that can be used for biological research in space. The basic structure is patently very similar, so changing our client does not inhibit our ability to create a real world solution.

Image source: Ossila, "Glovebox," 2022. Accessed via https://www.ossila.com/en-us/products/glove-box

Image source: Brian F Gore, "Engineering model of the Life Sciences Glovebox Facility," 2002. Accessed via https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Engineering-model-of-the-Life-Sciences-Glovebox-Facility-with-air-lock-module-attached-on_fig2_228794706

The main three aspects that will determine the success of our solution and the associated validation techniques are:

Upon conception of a solution, we will need to run a rough fluid dynamic analysis to ensure that our solution can maintain an airtight seal and if there may be any areas in which ballooning may occur. We will also have to research and estimate an evacuation time before moving forward with CADing and simulating our prototype. Lastly, we will need to perform a solids analysis to determine the load necessary to tension the gloves with axial forces along the fingertips of the gloves.

After these primary analyses corroborate the technical parameters for our solution, we will run experimental analyses with a crude design of the prototype and glovebox itself. We are considering the feasibility of running CFD analysis to address the airtight seal and potential ballooning in the gloves or sleeves. We plan on measuring the pressure inside the crude design of the glovebox and outside of the glovebox with a pressure gauge. Only when the pressure difference is essentially identical on both the inside and outside will we consider the prototype to be acceptable for vacuum seal. For evacuation, time taken to detach the prototype and exit the glovebox will be measured. It will then be compared to the original threshold of

expected evacuation time to determine if the prototype is able to be ejected from in a safe enough time and orderly manner. Displacement of the gloves to the fingertips will be determined by marking the original location of the fingertip. After testing, if the gloves possess an extension of less than 2 mm from the original point, we can deem that the gloves will fulfill the displacement requirement for the design.