Group Bonding... sort of-

The major challenge for our group design has been the construction of an inflatable matrix though which fluid can circulate. The desired affect being a surface that behaves as a circulatory system to regulate the temperature of a building in response to external conditions. A single bubble shown below-

Several issues have arisen from this design choice (among which are my own reservations regarding efficiency), mainly construction of a prototype as well as theoretical considerations for mass production. A heat-sealing process seems to be the industry standard for inflatables, but we are really lacking any sort of specialized tools to reproduce this. Armed with a soldering iron and a few yards of vinyl, we attempted to melt the sheets together. Early single bubbles were initially successful, but later attempts at the construction of a matrix of bubbles became... problematic.

The pictures above show our method of using a laser-cut chipboard template to guide the soldering iron. The quality of our heat sealing was awful. We had numerous burn marks and leaks.

Plan B: Breanna had initially suggested using the same glue as pool repair kits. We discounted this suggestion in favor of heat sealing because we thought the glue would be too difficult to control when we wanted a very grid-like matrix of hexagons.

Now the question was: how to utilize an adhesive and apply it in a controlled manner? Also, what kind of adhesive? As a general resource for glueing, I suggest using thistothat. It's a pretty fantastic website that can point you in the proper direction for glueing just about anything. Our options were to use either contact cement, or 3M 80, similar to spray77.

Application: Again using our lasercut template, I used the spray adhesive to bond the vinyl together, placing straws between each hexagon to maintain airflow once inflated.

We're exhausting all other options before attempting to use the contact cement because its pretty toxic stuff and outgases heavily, and it could take 7 days to dry completely!

Testing of the Adhesive-based structures to see if they are air/water-tight will begin as soon as they are dry.

I also continued to work on a heat-sealed version as I was waiting into the early morning hours for the spray adhesive to dry. After a bit of... modification to our group soldering iron, I was able to get a completely functioning matrix. Later testing should show us which construction method will be more durable.