Failure Characterization
Being placed with the exploratory design team, I was handed lots of autonomy from the beginning of my internship. In order to validate and test new valve designs, I worked closely with technicians and engineers to lead the characterziation and testing of the devices. I managed accelerated wear testing to test for fatigue failure and frame/leaflet loading tests to identify dynamic failure modes. I went through multiple rounds of root-cause analysis to inform design iterations. Failure modes that I helped identify include nitinol fractography and leaflet kinematic assessment.
Since much of my work involved fast-paced testing, I had the opportunity to create custom fixtures to reduce iteration time and experimental costs. I designed a custom silicon fixturing method that eliminated artifacts of testing on the BDC machines (shown below), particularly the seal-to-frame slippage by 70% of the original distance.
Adaptive Seal Mechanical Design
One of my main projects was the design of a new adaptive seal for a 29 millimeter valve diameter. I took the proposed design from Solidworks solid-body modeling to prototype manufacturing in the span of three weeks. I used informed design choices from the lead engineer to identify the optimal suturing locations for the seal to attach to the nitinol frame.
Tensile Testing
A co-worker and I spearheaded tensile strengh tests for component-level testing of the adaptive seal. I stumbled across this opportunity after volunteering myself for manual labor when I overheard Marcus needing an extra set of hands. I conducted tensile tests on the adaptive seal using an Instron test machine, quantiying the material performance of 15 different manufacturing methods. I helped develop the standard operating procedure (SOP) used for documentation and future benchmarking of different manufacturing methods.