Week 1 - Deciding Freshman Design III Topic

The class topics ranged from designing a building using sustainable materials to audio cheapskates and tweaks and finally to polymer composite fibers created from electrospinning. The topic chosen ended up being electrospinning of a specific polymer called poly(ethylene oxide) by changing the variables and testing the strength of the different fibers to see which is best for military purposes. Electrospinning involved all of the team member's majors in various forms.The majors of the group members are biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, and electrical engineering. The spinning part of the experiment includes concepts from electrical engineering due to the electrical current passing through the solution to create the fiber. The polymer, PEO, involves chemical engineering because to understand the solution chemical properties need to be analyzed. Finally it includes biomedical engineering because a large amount of the fibers can be used to create artificial tissue. With this being said the initial topic goal is to vary the distance from the needle to the collecting dish, changes the angle of the needle, varying the concentration of the solution, and finally varying the voltage of the current.