Team:Exeter/Notebook/July16
Thursday, 16 July
We had a meeting from 9am until 10:30am with two of our supervisors Mark and John who informed us when we'd be able to start lab work and gave us feedback about our project name and logo (essentially that they liked the logo but weren't sure about the name). Afterwards we had a whole team meeting at 11:30 to discuss Mark and John's feedback and decided we would change the name later if we thought of a better one.
Team Collaborations
At 12:30 we had a meeting with King's College London to discuss collaboration. They are also working on a 3D printer, for printing medical implants to encourage neuron regrowth after spinal cord injury and offered to work with us on modelling. We also offered to do some lab work for them as they won't have access to a lab this year.
Hydrogels and Modelling
We began researching into the mechanical properties of hydrogels. Pazzy Emailed Dr. Peter Petrov from the Physics department at Exeter about the physical structure of hydrogels and how to apply equations to describe their mechanical properties.
Dr Petrov responded with a paper which went through some of the basics of hydrogel structure and explained that the rubber elastic response in hydrogel is different to that of a simple elastic material because hydrogels exhibit a property known as viscoelasticity, which is a mixture of viscous behaviour of a fluid and elastic behaviour of solid materials..
Pazzy started coding a 'spring and dashpot' model to predict the hydrogel's viscoelasticity.