This week the team designed a beer faucet and two aesthetic attachments in SolidWorks.
Designing the beer tap, Josh and Brad took all the important dimensions that would be required to fit the metal internals from another faucet and utilized them in a new design. The internal cavity was optimized for fluid flow by using guided loft curves during the design. Also all sharp internal edges were smoothed with a small radius. While a CFD program was not used, as seen in the cross section below there are no sharp changes in flow direction within the beer faucet. The beer faucet had to be designed very similar to the one we are using the internal parts from. The internal plunger has a total travel of 0.200″ from the sealing surface of the beer faucet. This small amount of movement constrained us to use a similar geometry to our donor where the beer tap handle connects. The internal plunger also requires the curved downward exit to be in a specific location. Our model has thicker walls for the addition of a threaded exit to accept various attachments. It will be these attachments that set the beer faucet apart from others available. The design of the beer faucet can be seen below.
Alex and Matt worked on a tap attachment to provide a new way of pouring a beer. This attachment can fill one or two glasses at the same time. An added bonus for getting beer from tap to hand! This attachment can be seen below.
Tom and Ryan have been working on the nozzle shown below. This design incorporates a visual aeration of the beer to release distinctive notes by beer style. Testing will be done to learn the foaming characteristics of the beer from this nozzle. This is a new idea and our group has not seen something like this for beer before.
With all of our prototypes we believe we can produce water tight parts with additive manufacturing technology. We will first start with FDM as a quick way to learn how the parts mate together. We believe we can find a wall thickness for FDM models that will allow for a water tight structure. Some problems we may encounter with FDM will be part shrinkage most notably around the build platform. As the part is printed and cools small areas of support structure near the build platform have the potential to release or curl up. Also internal support structure with the same material as the part using FDM technology may be hard to remove in the curved areas.
For our final part we are thinking about using Powder Bed Fusion AM. The improved resolution over FDM will allow for threads that will hopefully be usable. The support powder will also be much easier to remove from internal cavities.