What is Thermo-Gen?
The industry of material manufacturing, particularly insulating material manufacturing, is both expansive and critical. The industry encompasses a wide range of stakeholders such as government entities like the United States military and NASA, and many private manufacturers. A defining characteristic of this industry is its focus on creating materials that provide thermal insulation/protection for specialized equipment, such as heat-resistant uniforms and space vehicles, those of which are integral in research fields like aerospace research. Although often overlooked by the general public, this industry plays a vital role in allowing for essential activities like space exploration, firefighting, and operating in hazardous environments. Our client and sponsor, HeetShield, operates directly within the insulating materials industry. Thermo-Gen is dedicated to developing automation software for testing high performance thermal insulation developed by HeetShield. Our goal is to continuously refine this system to enhance automation and efficiency, making our client's testing process more reliable and user friendly. To give a brief overview, our software will be an application that will be downloaded onto the laboratory computer that is used for materials testing. Once our application is downloaded, the computer will be attached to the power supply and the pressure valve of the testing apparatus. Once all components are connected, the software can then be powered up and used as follows: The technician will open the user interface and input the desired pressure and temperature they want to test with. After inputting the data, the system will receive data from the gauges on the apparatus to get the current state of the environment. From there, the software will work via its connections to the power supply and pressure valve to adjust the pressure and temperature to the desired pressure values that the technician inputted into the system. Once the desired values are met by the testing environment, a window notification will alert the technician via a pop-up and a sound. If the conditions cannot be met by the environment, the technician will also be alerted of that issue. Overall, the goal of this system we are building is to cut down the amount of time the technician needs to dedicate to testing. Right now, the technician has to manually control a power supply and pressure valve to control the environmental elements which can take hours and lack the precision that they may need in the testing environment. With our system, this task will be eliminated from a manual perspective; the technician can set the parameters and walk away to handle another task and the system will alert when it is ready.
Who is our client?
Our client, HeetShield creates thermal materials used across several technical disciplines for purposes of protection of users. HeetShield has been working on manufacturing and testing these materials since 2020 under the leadership of Steve Miller with contracted work to organizations like NASA and the United States Marine Corps. Visit their website to learn more about their products and services:
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