industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney ...

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industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney 2007 Dispersion The technologies looked into as dispersion possibilities: • Heating oil and dispersing with a fan, • Airbrush, compressed air, • Mechanical Atomizer, with or without propellant, • Inkjet Technologies, • Scratch-n-Sniff, mechanical activation methods, • Piezoelectric pump, • Piezo vibrator. • The heating of oil was investigated first. I obtained an amount of ultra-clear gel, which can contain essential oil within it. What I did, was melt some of this gel with some oil, poured it into volumetric flasks and allowed it to set with a hollow through the middle of them. These were then attached to a wooden box. Each of the two compartments had a fan and a heating lamp in them. When one smell was required, the lamp and the fan were turned on in that compartment. This would force warm air to travel through that specific flask and cause a resulting change in the smell of the air. The problem with this method is that it is difficult to expel all of the heat in one go and so it is also difficult to control the total blend of aroma. Where accuracy in odour is required, this method is not an option. flasks containing aromatic gel, connected to a box with heat lamps and fans 24
industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney 2007 the bottom of the flask showing the hollow the fully assembled apparatus • Airbrushing is interesting as a technique except that you require some compression of the oil mixture or need a powerful pump. Also this method may be dangerous as you are atomizing volatile gases at high pressure and therefore this becomes a possible flamethrower. • Ditto mechanical atomizer. • Inkjet technologies are very exciting. An Epson printer head works as tiny piezoelectric diaphragms vibrate, forcing ink out of tiny holes at very high accuracies. Care also must be taken here, as the flash point of the oils is so low and could ignite as before. This topic is dealt with again later. an epson print head with the tiny holes etched into the surface • Scratch and sniff technologies can be considered reasonably one-shot and are not really suitable for this product. • Piezoelectric pumps are very nifty devices. I sourced some particularly tiny versions from a company called Bartels Mikrotechnik in Germany. These are tiny diagram pumps, injection molded with tiny check valves integrated within them. A small piezoelectric chip vibrates at 90 Hz allowing very accurate flow from 50nl to 15μl per minute, ideal for this product. 25
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