We’ve launched a funding opportunity to help our student club complete the H2-Flo Hydrogen liquifier + refueling station. What could be the first in Washington State! Here is a video discussing the project:

Your tax-deductible donations will primarily fund the final pieces of equipment necessary to make our demonstrator field-implementable. Most specifically, we need a commercial grade Stirling Cycle precooler, a hydrogen compressor, an electrolyzer, and the dispensing interface. Our overall goal of $450,000 will allow us to realize the first hydrogen refueling station in Washington State. In return for your generosity, you will receive a gift commensurate with the level of your donation (yes the levels are cummulative):

This post summarizes the use of Swagelok^® Tube Fittings, which are used extensively in the HYPER lab. If you’re already familiar with tube fittings, you may want to skip to the best practices at the bottom. Most of this guide is pulled directly from “An Installer’s Pocket Guide for Swagelok^® Tube Fittings.” If you haven’t read this already, you should! We have several physical copies around the lab.

Table of Contents

What is a tube fitting?

Swagelok^® Tube Fittings are also referred to as Swagelok Fittings, Tube Fittings, or Compression Fittings. You’ll see similar fittings at the local hardware store, but beware – they aren’t the same! While both the hardware store variety of compression fitting, and the Swagelok fitting operate by swaging, or forming the tube around hard metal ferrules, the Swagelok fitting is a robust, double ferrule design whereas the hardware store variety is almost always a single ferrule design. In the above picture, you see a female nut with the two hard metal ferrules installed correctly to a male fitting body (in this case, an NPT adapter). The bends in the tubing around the ferrules signify the seal locations between the ferrules and the tubing.

First Installation: Swaging

Before Installing for the first time, ensure that the tubing and fitting are in good order. The tubing should be clean and free of scratches at the ends. The tubing should already be bent into the desired shape, and you should check  for sizing to ensure proper fit (this insures we don’t waste nuts and ferrules by swaging onto the tubing before measuring). If you cut the tubing, be sure to clean the tubing with a burr-removal tool. The tubing end should be completely round and clear of burrs or dents.

The above steps point you through the process of swaging the nut ferrule onto a fitting. Be aware! While most of our fittings require 1-1/4 turns to swage, smaller fittings may require 3/4 turn. Make sure your tubing is all the way into the fitting body – you will not get a good seal if you don’t properly seat the tubing.

After your first installation (swaging the ferrules on the tubing) you can ensure proper tightening by using the gauging tool. HYPER lab has a gauging tool that can test our most commonly used fitting sizes. Try to insert the correct side of the gauging tool into the gap between the nut and fitting body. If you are able to insert the gauging tool into the gap, the fitting must be tightened further. If you cannot, the fitting is properly tightened. BEWARE: The gauging tool only works on the initial installation of the fitting. If you remove the tubing from the fitting and reseal, you are not guaranteed proper tightening with the gauging tool.

Reinstallation: When you have to disconnect and reconnect lines.

Before you disconnect a tube fitting, ensure that the system is depressurized. It is not recommended that you depressurize any system by loosening any fitting, including tubing fittings. Doing so could potentially shoot fittings and/or tubing across the room. Mark the fitting as indicated in the instructions below before taking the fitting apart.

Again, as stated above, the gauging tool will not help you to determine if a fitting you have resealed is correctly tightened.

Best Practices

The following list are best practices developed by members of the lab for working with tubing fittings.

Marking fittings

Always mark fittings before tightening (or loosening) the fittings. It will ensure that fittings are properly tightened, and will prevent over-tightening. This will increase the lifespan of our fittings and tubing. Clean fittings after finishing so your markings don’t get in the way for next time.

Hard to reach fittings

If the fitting body you’re trying to attach tubing to is in a hard to reach area, use a different fitting body to swage the tubing, then remove the tube from the fitting and install in location. In this case, you will not be able to use markings to help you reseal the fitting – tighten the fitting until hand tight, then tighten 1/4 turn more with wrenches.

Correct tubing thicknesses

The recommended tubing thickness for using fractional tubing fittings for stainless steel and copper tubing are given below. For gas service, it is recommended that you use a tubing thickness outside the shaded areas in the charts.

For other materials, or metric recommendations, please consult “An Installer’s Pocket Guide for Swagelok^® Tube Fittings.”

Water and Steel

Water has become a problem in our compressed air lines, which is evident on our steel quick disconnects. The rust and corrosion can result in weakened fittings, contamination of equipment using the air line. Worst of all the fittings were all seized up! To continue the Kaizen, or continuous improvement, of the lab we are improving the use of our air line fittings. This is the first problem we are having, these are also older fittings and can be difficult to connect and disconnect. To test the solution we started by trying out several options and weighing them against each other. Shown below is the old fitting removed from the current connections.

Exploring multiple design solutions

Here we have 3 options under consideration for replacing the airline fittings. All of these fitting were available in the lab for testing and going over customer reviews. It was found that aluminum fittings are more suitable for home users who don’t disconnect fittings very frequently. The Current steel fitting will corrode and both did not have the flow rates required for our Haskell air driven compressors. The brass and steel connectors are rated to 300 psi. However the High flow version supports 74 SCFM while the normal only supports 40 SCFM. Nearly double the flow rate!

Show below are the male versions of the fittings, The female High flow connectors work with male fittings of our other varieties without leaking. making the female high flow connectors the best choice for use in the lab. This follows the poka-yoke philosophy meaning that things can be used with minimal mental and physical effort. Another Post on Kaizen and poka-yoke. By making all of the female fittings able to work with all the male fittings in the lab there can’t be a mistake breaking anything if you don’t grab a high flow male fitting for your experiment!

All female wall connections have been switched to the high flow versions. We have also installed two water trap air regulators in the spaces to limit fluid damage to any equipment.

Use of the regulators:

For Disconnecting a regulator to use somewhere else:

–Everyone should be able to find them, so the regulators have a home. As shown below and shall be returned to their locations after use

–The connections can easily go flying if care is not taken to relief the pressure. To Disconnect ensure that the airline connection ball valve is closed, then bleed the pressure at the bottom of the water trap.

For changing regulator pressure:

–Pull the knob down underneath the regulator, then turn the knob to adjust. (Do not force the knob as it may not be engaged)

One of the ways our Composer in Residence is improving our community is through books. We started a general personal/communal improvement library with the following entries through his recommendations:

• Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte
• Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, Volume 1: Induction and Analogy in Mathematics by George Polya
• Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle
• Architecture: Form, Space and Order by Francis D.K. Ching
• Language in Thought and Action by S.I. Hayakawa

Update: recent contributions from Jake’s collection:

• Steal Like an Artist and,
• Show Your Work! both by Austin Kleon.

If there is a particular book or books that you would recommend to help us think outside the box and improve our community please sent them to the following suggestion box: jacob.leachman@wsu.edu

“How do we design more inclusive spaces that promote creativity and diversity?” — Is a question that every company, university, and administrator that is designing products or spaces is currently considering. It’s a major key to thriving environments! Here in the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture (VCEA) at WSU this has been a perennial discussion topic for several decades. Yet we remain decidedly average in diversity numbers. We seem stuck in the same rut as most while we watch companies like Google accelerate into the future. The key questions remain intractable: Why are we stuck? How do we fix it given our limited resources? And what can we do now?

Why we are stuck:

One of my good friends and mentors from my days at the University of Idaho is Regents Professor Dan Bukvich. In a 2014 interview with the UI Alumni magazine about his lifetime of achievement, Dan summed up the problem:

“I’ve been to a lot of places where people designed spaces for themselves and ended up incredibly limited.”

When given a windfall donation the vast majority of Universities and traditional companies will F themselves- fractionate and fractalize. Dan observed that music programs tend to carve out a percussion room, vocal room, strings room, performance halls, etc. Pretty soon they find in-group/out-group dynamics, siloing, and a lack of overlap and cohesion. Sound familiar? WSU has done the same thing. This is a natural result of faux-performance based thinking in the authoritarian-legalistic v-Meme. The authoritarian and legalistic v-Meme structures are naturally tree-like due to simplified design laws that culminate in fractal geometries. Do the same thing over and over again whenever you get more sunlight/resources and eventually you will cover all of your bases. Read my prior post “How Universities Evolved Tree-like Structures” for more.

The problem? Accelerating change. Trees tend not to pull up their roots to evolve and adapt quickly to new stimuli. They die and hope an offspring starts over with the right derivative skill set. Another word typically used to describe these types of organisms and organizations is “waterfall”– things flow one-way and you can’t go back, everything must be done by a certain time and you move on. For those of you familiar with the current problems of the Acadamy, it’s a real question whether we’ll make it through the 21st century without revolution.

Within MME we’re currently considering how to renovate our Design, Manufacturing, and Controls (DMC) Faculty and curriculum. Do we carve out a space to design, another space to build, another to assemble, and a final to test? Or can we think of another way?

We’re stuck, and it doesn’t look good.

Thankfully, we only tend to act like trees in a psychological v-Meme sense. We’re not a one-and-done tree, unlike the waterfall we must continually improve and iterate. We can change the program and fix it whenever we realize that we can and must.

How we can fix it

Let’s bring this back to the University of Idaho and my friend Dan Bukvich. Where most schools have many rehearsal halls and the fractionated approach to space allocation, the UI School of Music has just 1 rehearsal hall for everything. How is this possible? It’s literally used all day, every day. Given the limited resources the UI had at the time, the faculty came together and came up with a system to turn the space over in less than ten minutes for the next group. They innovated incredible transitions between classes to get the space converted quickly for the next group, whether percussion, strings, or vocal. The result? Idaho is known internationally for incredibly creative, high-energy transitions between performances, and student and faculty collaborations that transcend traditional boundaries in novel ways. That’s no accident — they forced themselves to innovate with what they had (people) and thereby freed themselves of the traditional building/space/money pits. They have to take a systemic v-Meme approach to realize the space must quickly look and act entirely differently to accept the new class, faculty member approach, and instrument paradigm. The result? The UI performs on performance night regardless of the group.

No surprise, this systemic v-Meme propagates to those close by. The UI has another fantastic example of systemic v-Meme use of space that’s even more relevant to VCEA in the UI Mechanical Engineering Department. The UI Capstone Design program was recently recognized by the National Academy of Engineering as one of 8 “Exemplary” programs for creating real-world engineering experiences. On the surface you’ll see a hub and spoke style design with a core machine shop, assembly area, design space, and club space. But the real magic is how the people are structured within the space. Rather than having graduate students associated with fractionated classes, the UI paired graduate students with sponsored projects and competitions, which adds a vertical project-centered aspect to their curriculum. Lean manufacturing is also a key focus.

Lean manufacturing is the Japanese design philosophy focusing on client empathy and continuous improvement of practice. The UI ME program is very “lean” through connecting course projects to continuously improve the function of the space. The music program does something very similar through educational-focused student projects. When everyone, and every class is continuously improving this core functioning area, and the community rallies around completion of sponsored projects, you see incredibly innovated results anchored in the physical world. It’s no coincidence that the UI won the NAE recognition and has won many SAE Clean Snowmobile Awards and the SAE Formula-hybrid competition.

This type of environment that is quickly reconfigurable, adaptable, and focused on real-world product delivery is known as “Agile” within the design world. The term “Agile” spun out of the philosophies of lean manufacturing to dominate the world of software engineering. Agile methods are well established online. What’s important to note is that I’m not advocating an either “Agile” or “Waterfall” approach, I’m simply advocating that we do more than just traditional “Waterfall”. Here’s a great read on Agile in a Waterfall World. Our library has an e-book version of the textbook: “Agile Practices for Waterfall Projects“.

With excellent equipment, facilities, staff, students, and textbook resources like those above, just about the only reason we at WSU have for not doing agile systems is that we have just enough money not to be forced to. The UI had to resort to systemic v-Meme, agile methods and spaces because they did not have enough resources from the state to do anything else several decades ago. Now that WSU’s resources are strained by the new Medical School and aggressive hiring of new tenure track faculty lines without additional staff, we too are approaching the must-change event horizon.

What we can do now

We need to take stock of our existing spaces. What percentage of the week are they utilized? Are they doing real work for our community and regional constituents? How empathetic are the spaces to users and neighboring spaces (i.e. do people know what is happening so that they can help)?

We can then start integrating and sharing our spaces for both research and teaching. When we are aligned with actually producing real product for our constituents, the lines between research and teaching blur. A design-build-assembly-test hub can be carved out of within bigger spaces and through combinations of spaces. The more you blur the lines between design-build-assemble-test, the more innovation and iteration you will get.

Aligning our people around real, sponsored projects for the constituents of our region changes our values to the core. Dr. Chuck has been advocating for a project Arrivals and Departures board for years. This kind of information flow can be accomplished by pairing graduate students and faculty with projects instead of classes. They can then get several classes working on aspects of their projects. The students get more from real world experiences, and the entire program gets more funding from the region. HINT: That’s a positive synergy. Another key result from this — the classic problem of deciding what courses to teach becomes easier. We teach the courses that our projects and region need us to teach to continue to deliver the products they need!

Many have said we need a new $60 million building to do this kind of thing. That would help. But we need to just do what we can, with what we have, where we are at. We just need to begin.

The resource crunch is necessitating a phase change on the horizon, and before we double down on the command and control waterfall of old, we need to embrace our quickly changing agile future.

This is the HYPER lab’s 200th post in just over 1.5 years. Around 1 post every 3 days.

Thanks for reading everyone!

Let’s group into the teams we’ve generated using CATME.

Take a moment to tell your new team members 1. where you’re from, 2. why you’re here, and 3. what problem you will solve in the world someday.

We’re going to kick things off in your new team with a high energy example of how this semester could, but hopefully won’t, play out. (start build a tower, build a team challenge)

While this demonstration is fun, and somewhat informative about team functioning issues, there are several problems here. The marshmallow challenge is somewhat of a “canned” exercise. It’s highly thought about, highly constrained (e.g. you only get 1 yard of string, not 2, 18 minutes, not 18 weeks) and the goal is very simple and easily measurable. While that may be good for developing a “clean” story for an environment like TED, and is all too common in academia when we teach ‘design’, it’s incredibly misleading about the realities of the design process. Real problems hardly ever work out this cleanly.

In many ways, the marshmallow challenge is analogous to being in a math class and being asked to find the solution to a differential equation. You have no idea who you are solving it for or why and you have no idea where it came from or how. So you take the equation, enter it into Wolfram Alpha and (Ta-Da!) problem solved. You really have no idea how it happened or what it’s good for. There is a reason the machines can do this now.

The real challenge (and value!) is taking something in the real world in front of you, that somebody cares about, and carefully defining the problem in such a way that allows you to come up with a differential equation to solve that adequately represents the physics of the problem and adds real value. Translated to our design class: taking a real client, who hardly ever knows exactly what they want, need, or how to do it, and executing a design process that leads that ends up with them being happy.

Our customer this semester is Ag-Energy Solutions out of Spokane. They are coming one week from today (next Wednesday). We need to educate ourselves as quickly as possible to the nature of their need. In a nutshell, they make a system that produces activated charcoal and waste biogas (which has a lot of hydrogen) from farm waste. They need a system that increases the value of that biogas waste through purification and densification of the hydrogen so we can sell it to the highest paying customers.

I’m guessing you have little to no idea how this is done. Which makes it very difficult to ask them good questions. Time to start reading. Our engineering librarian, Chelsea Leachman, is coming to class on Friday to help you find and use the resources the library has for this design. You’ll need to have the following documents for that lecture as Chelsea will help you prepare them:

1. Stakeholder Interview Plan – To be completed as a team and uploaded to your team’s Slack thread before class on Wednesday (20th).

You’ll want to focus on how this need is currently addressed and what the necessary components/parts of the process are.

He didn’t have access to modern day computers. A lot of research is in progress and you may wonder how they work. Good news! You can build one in your home with some hardware store parts. Here is an instructable on How to build a Vortex tube in your own home!

My undergraduate research project is on the computational modeling of the vortex tube. The long term goal of determining the most important geometric parameters. It is also important to determine how each of these factors into various fluids, specifically hydrogen. With patented technology the plan is to use the vortex tube in a modified Claude cycle to reduce the cost of liquefying hydrogen.

Working away on CFD modeling is a learning process with many nuances to every set of software. Comsol is not without exceptions. As a result of compounding the experience using Comsol Multiphysics, I am finally able to start getting results. This is to accomplish the goal of modeling the vortex tube to show the effects of different geometry in the vortex tube.

Phase 1 is to model a real life vortex tube to relate computational results to physical ones. In the HYPER lab we currently have a small commercial vortex tube from Vortec this model is based on.

Elijah will run an experiment with CHEF to learn more about the molecular separation mechanism with this device. There are high hopes this will unveil more understanding about the vortex tube by utilizing the orthohydrogen/parahydrogen spin flip properties. The CFD modeling has yielded some impressive visuals to assist in the understanding of how this device operates.

Currently I have been able to reach a solution with a cold mass fraction of 0.043 and 0.069 (0.043 shown). The first Image is the velocity streamlines with the temperature in kelvin represented by the color scheme. While the second image represents the streamline velocities in m/s on the color scale.

Temperature (K)

Velocity (m/s)

By varying the Hot outlet boundary condition pressure as is commonly done, we are not required to create a new mesh. This will assist in modeling through several iterations in a shorter duration. The limiting factor in these simulations is needing to refine the specific region between the cold and hot streams where they are traveling opposite directions. Given a little trial and error with refining the mesh in that error we should have more results soon!