Difference between revisions of "Team:UMaryland/Design"

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<p> We began by working out how to wire the hairdryer so that we could regulate the heating unit and the fan separately.
 
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After a lot of soldering and reworking the internal safety measures inside the hairdryer, we were able to wire the system so that we could turn the heat on and off while running the fan continuously. Using tape, we secured a sheet of aluminium foil to the top of the heating unit of the hairdryer. The outer casing of the hairdryer had been removed. We placed a heat sensor inside the tin to measure the temperature of the air inside the machine.  By wiring the heat sensor to the Arduino we were able to receive input/feedback from the sensor and adjust heating of the device to maintain our desired setpoints. We were able to regulate the heat of the machine in order to produce proper thermocycling.
 
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At this point, we tried to perform our first PCR reaction. Unfortunately, we soon found that we had melted our tube. We learned that the machine had difficulty with evenly distributing the heat. To better distribute the heat, we removed our tinfoil lid and replaced it with with a cut soda can. This can was designed with evenly spaced holes enabling for better heat distribution. Although we did not and still have not modeled the heat transfer of between the can's surface and the convection heating generated by the hair dryer, we were able to experimentally conclude that the heat distribution was more even across the can than the tin foil.
 
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<img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/0/01/IMG_07741.jpg" style="width:450px;height:450px;float:left;">
 
<img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/d/d5/2015-08-24_13.13.46.jpg" style="width:450px;height:600px;float:center;">
 
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<p>After construction of the can based cover we tried PCR once more and still found that the reaction did not occur. We assumed that the heat sensor might have been an issue,; the sensor was exposed to the moving air and was relaying information about the air temperature instead of the temperature inside of the PCR tubes. This meant that our feedback system was not accurately responding and controlling the temperature inside of the PCR tubes. Assuming the temperatures inside the machine were not representative of the temperatures inside the PCR tubes, we put the heat sensor inside a PCR tube with mineral oil and placed this inside one of the holes. We ran another PCR reaction, ran the products on a gel and saw a large band of the correct size, indicating that our machine had worked.
 
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<img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/9/95/UMD_PCR_full_machine.jpg" style="width:450px;height:600px;float:center;">
 
<img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/9/95/UMD_PCR_full_machine.jpg" style="width:450px;height:600px;float:center;">

Revision as of 03:16, 19 September 2015