Final Design

Our final design consists of a handheld mechanical tool that will acquire 100 vials at once from a shipping bulk, and deploy them into the patented Fly Vial Reload Tray, from Flystuff.com, a division of Genesee Scientific.

It is very important to notice that the vials come organized in a Hexagonal Compact packing structure, the "Honeycomb pattern", which has been proved to be the densest of all possible plane packings.

The Reload Tray was designed to accommodate the vials in a square packing lattice, and this difference in the packing structures became one of the main concerns in this project. The tool was designed around the ability to reshape the pattern of the vials, and, because of that, will consist of many mechanisms, movable parts and will require both hands to be properly operated. There is also springs to secure and release the vials. Reshaping the packing pattern requires only a relative movement between the hands of the user. While based on the observation of the usual laboratory assistant’s work, the “vial grabbing method” resembles the action of sticking a finger inside the tube. The overall process cycle of how the tool works is presented below.

             After activating and removing the tool from the box, the user might change the pattern from honeycomb to square in order to fit into the tray. This step is explained below.

             Finally, after reshaping, the last step is to drop the vials into the tray as shown below.