Home Page - Team 12

UCSD Biology Dept - Biology Lab Automation

Team Members: Mingyuan Li Yinjie Lu Yiming Wang Garrett Francis

Background and Objectives:

- Department prepares various samples for laboratory courses every quarter
  - Approximately 12000 tubes used each academic year
- Substances must be labelled, unknown substances could be anything
  - May present biohazard to staff and students
  - Costly to deal with, requires professional disposal
- Current method is to print sheets of adhesive labels and apply manually
  - Requires many labor hours
  - Highly educated faculty could be more productive
- Tasked to automate labelling using a Markem Imaje 9410 printer
  - Already purchased by department to label petri dishes
  - Remote print head can be integrated to label sample tubes

The Rotary Conveyor system should be able to catch the tube and rotate it at a certain speed for printing, and then drop off it after printing. The test is performed by controlling the rotational speed of the motor and manually feeding the tubes into the conveyor. The test was done with a 12V power supply with different speed settings of 1/10, ⅛, ⅙ of motor’s maximum speed. As a result, the system was able to rotate at a constant speed and tubes were able to be transferred by the Conveyor.

Performance Results:

Final Design:

The final system design consists of three subsystems: the feeder system, the conveyor system, and the printer system. This design does require interaction to continuously load the tubes into the feeder slot, queueing them for the rotary conveyor. The conveyor system then takes the tubes one by one, passes them sequentially under the print sensor and in front of the printhead at a constant speed of 50rpm (0.236 m/s linear speed), then finally discharges the printed tubes for later sterilization. The printer system components are an existing Markem-Imaje 9410 inkjet date printer and a Markem-Imaje retro-reflective sensor. The printer head of the printer is mounted on the rotary system as in Figure 2. The retro-reflective sensor is mounted just next to it and connected to the printer with a 1m cable. The sensor is compatible to communicate with the printer by a built in program in the printer.

Future design efforts should focus on improving the feeder bowl performance, which proves to be a formidable task in its own right. The main focus of this project was enabling the system to work with the most commonly used microcentrifuge tube, however there are a variety in use by the laboratory. The conveyor disc must be adapted to accept multiple tube sizes, or enable the user to quickly change parts to meet the same accomodation. Below is the idealized totally automatic system.

Future Improvement:

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