R&D fluid dynamic simulation of next-gen mixing chamber
Here is a look into our long-term R&D process. We've given Ben and Ray a full year (up to 2 years) to work on difficult problems before needing to ship anything new. Our current v1.4 models don't have any major negatives, so instead of tinkering, we want to work on more substantive things.
Ben is working on a new hot water mixing system, planned for release in 2022. It will not introduce any new features to the DE1, but it does condense 3 separate parts in our current model, into one. It also removes 8 water tubes, and one of two quite expensive medical-grade flow constrictors.
This video is a fluid dynamic simulation of hot and cold water mixing. Ben is trying to understand how well the water is mixing. Turbulence, eddies, and other complicated physical aspects of moving liquids can cause water mixing to be less even, which would then affect our temperature stability.
Ben's fluid dynamic simulations of water flow onto the coffee puck, 5 years ago, led to a radically different design of how the Decent places water onto a dry puck. We believe it's the main reason why it's so difficult to intentionally cause channeling on the Decent, yet so easy to have that problem on other machines.
This sort of computerized modelling so much cheaper and faster than physical modelling, which will be done as a later step, once the computer thinks we've got something that might work well. Then we'll test it in the real world, in an infrared camera, to see how closely the models match reality, and what improvements still need to be made.
-john
Updated 2021/01/08