Project for NCSU's First Year Engineering Design Day
Collaborated with a team to design, fabricate, and test a waterproof textile bucket, strictly adhering to the engineering design process and managing the project timeline with a Gantt chart. Developed a seamless, origami-inspired structure, modeled it in Fusion 360, and selected materials—including an epoxy-laminated ripstop polyester—based on literature reviews and small-scale tests. The project culminated in a functional prototype that successfully met the water-retention requirements for the First Year Engineering Design Day.
Type: Textile Engineering
Goal: Construct some type of waterproof laminate material out of non-waterproof textiles to construct a bucket that can hold water for more than one minute.
Problems: Had very little knowledge about the science behind waterproof materials, textile fabrication. We needed to keep to a rigid time scale and budget. In addition, we found that the seams were going to be the most water escaped from the waterproof bag.
Solutions: Made a synthetic laminate material out of synthetic polyester fabric and a child safe epoxy. Our design was origami inspired and featured no seams, allowing for the a critical failure point to be mitigated.
Time: April 2024
Learned Skills:
How can we solve build a waterproof bag, with little to no textile expirence, under a time and budget constraint? What possible problems could show up?
We need to develop a design, determine material selection, and then produce a plan for fabrication. The seams of the bag seem like the bigges failure point and need to be designed around
The design of the bag will be origami-inspired with no seams to mitigate failure points. In addation we will use a epoxy/ripstop polyester laminate for strength and it's waterproof capiblities
Learn about textiles, laminates, and sewing techniques
Construct bucket on time scale required by project, test different laminate types, construct full sized laminate, fold into design, fasten into final shape, prepare for final testing before presentation