Hello everyone, welcome to this blog.
You may have noticed the above abstract is a little bit vague; it is going to be subject to some change as I become more familiar with the workings of the production of battery seals in this injection molding facility.
This is the end of my first week working at MicroTech Southwest, since I'll be heading out for a debate tournament in UC Berkeley from tomorrow until Monday. So far, it's been pretty informative.
MTSW makes battery seals out of two kinds of material: nylon 6,6 (pronounced six-six) and nylon 6,12 (six-twelve), with 6,12 being the superior grade. These are injected into different molds of battery seals by machines, producing either sixty-four or ninety-six parts each time. They are then processed to control for various factors including hydration, etc.
For the past week I have been working primarily in the quality lab, where Aniruddh and I have been tasked with measuring the dimensions (hub height, wall width, etc.) of a random sample of a particular mold of a type of battery seal. Through this we familiarized ourselves with the different types of parts and molds.
In the past two days I have also been conducting burst tests. These test the seal strength by exposing the seals to a pressure differential created by an inflow of nitrogen gas. As the pressure rises, the machine records the specific psi at which the various seals burst. These must fall within the specific range that indicate that when a battery discharges quickly and vents gas, the seal does not burst and allow the battery to explode, potentially causing serious injury.
Unfortunately the burst testing machine was rather fickle today and stopped working while I was using it :(. It was fixed quickly and I was able to resume work, so there was no harm.
I look forward to learning about and working with other aspects of the facility as well. So far, this project is going great!
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