Final Post

All great things must come to an end and this incredible experience of conducting summer research at the U of M is no exception. The research process was long and grueling but very rewarding as I learned more in these last two months about practical engineering than I did all year at school. I had many set backs machining parts I needed for my experimental set up and that has taught me that you can't just make everything you draw up in CAD, you have to think HOW you are going to cut each piece and if it will stand up to the stress/pressure you require it to. That being said I did finally create a custom manifold to allow a laser micrometer to record the displacement of check valve poppets under different pressure differentials and tank/load switching frequencies. The final experimental set up (after a lot of headaches and fixing leaks) was the following:

With this set up I recorded the poppets movement and found something interesting! operating at a system pressure of 1500, a tank/load duty cycle of .5, and an experiment running time of 10 seconds I obtained the following result:

You can see as the poppet returns to its seat that it makes a little rebound after the initial contact with the seat! This combined with the pressure sensor data shows great promise that my theory of the poppet rebounding as it hits the seat could be the reason why the check valves leak in switch-mode circuits.