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Design students win manufacturing award
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15/07/2008
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Four students from Cambridge University have won a commercial manufacturing award run by the University’s Institute for Manufacturing.
The students, who won the Shearline Manufacturability Award, created a redesign of the precision pipette, one of the most commonly used laboratory instruments, to address ease of use and ergonomic issues.
While current laboratory pipettes satisfy the need for precision and reliability, their design falls short in terms of ease of use. They are entirely thumb-operated and are known to cause cases of repetitive strain injury. The students successfully designed a comfortable, easy to use pipette, the ‘Ergopip’ (pictured), which distributes workload to the user’s fingers and is just as precise and reliable as existing versions.
The team received the award for making best consideration to design for production issues by creating a fully working mechanical model with well thought through product components and detailed engineering drawings, which could be put through to manufacturing production.
The award organisers said that in terms of manufacturing production, the ‘Ergopip’ project had real and immediate market potential. The fully working prototypes and detailed drawings for all of the system’s components were very impressive and could quickly be worked on and made ready for full scale manufacture.
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Author
Ken Hurst
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