By Jack Searson
On 15th November the collection team adapted our previous experiments completed at Oracle to smaller-scale lab conditions.
We used a small lab hoover, sand in a 350x250mm tray and scattered nurdles over the surface of the sand, varying the coverage from 100% to as small as 5%.
Our aim was to optimise the vacuum process. To do this we used the various vacuum adaptions to compare nozzle shape and suction head to see how it affected the effectiveness of nurdle pick up.
Using these results we can optimise our design to be bespoke to nurdles rather than using equipment designed for different functions.
We found that a thinner nozzle was more effective at picking up nurdles than the circular nozzle for the nurdle-to-sand ratio as seen in the graph below.
We also found that increasing the suction head generally made the mass pickup per second worse across all nurdle coverages. In some cases the nurdle-to-sand pick-up ratio was better with the longer suction head, however, further research is required to find out what the optimal suction head is to pick up nurdles and leave behind the sand.
Finding from these experiments are fundamental going forward to shape our design. We now aim to repeat these experiments for accuracy whilst also increasing the variety of nozzle size and shape and suction head.
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