Check Valve Redux

 I had an opportunity to test my bearing-ball check valve idea, at least in terms of how it works in a pneumatic sense.  I discovered that my idea was flawed by the need to incorporate two incompatible requirements.  The first:  the ball has to fit easily into the end of the tube to seal.  The second:  the force pulling the ball into the tube has to be small so the check valve works with a very small pressure differential.

The practical result of these requirements was that the hole in the piston where the ball goes has to be very nearly the same diameter as the ball.  But this means that the air has to flow through a pretty small constriction around the ball. The end result was that there wasn't much of a difference in the flow rates.  I thought of some ways to get around this problem but they all had their own complications -- including noticeably more machining work.

So instead of that approach I went with a much simpler flap valve arrangement, made with a square piece of acrylic film.  The film is placed over a hole drilled in the base, which serves as the air inlet.  To promote free flow of the air, I also milled a shallow slot from the end of the base up to the hole.  I cut a square piece of the plastic film and then made three cuts in the form of a U, to free that portion of the plastic, enabling it to move up (away) from the hole, or down toward it to form a seal when the piston is being pushed into the cylinder.  That worked OK, but it worked even better when I made more cuts to widen the gaps between the flap and the rest of the plastic sheet.  I think the narrow slits didn't allow the flap to completely seal.

Putting a little lubricating oil in between the plastic and base would probably work even better -- for awhile, but the oil could attract dust and then the seal would likely fail.  In this case a little less (of a seal) is more, in terms of longevity of the damper.  That said, I also made the damper so it can be taken apart and cleaned if that becomes necessary.

A Check Valve For My Soft-Close Drawer Project

 I had originally intended to use an off-the-shelf check valve to use in my pneumatic soft-close mechanism, but the more I played around with the overall idea, the less suitable it appeared to be.  It would have to hang off the side of the cylinder.  The piston needed to be "special" to accommodate the need to put a hole in the cylinder for the air to pass through.  And so on.

So I was thinking about integrating my own check valve into the piston itself.  The original design used the aluminum stem for the air flow (it is a tube), with a ball bearing to act as the seal.  The bearing would be pushed against the end of the tube with a small spring.  The tube, bearing and spring would be installed in the piston.

But my piston is only .75" long, and it was hard to find the right itty-bitty spring so I decided to replace the spring with yet another magnet that would pull the bearing onto the end of the tube.  The magnet would be a ring magnet that the aluminum tube slides through, and would be glued to the top (or outer) side of the piston.  I liked this approach because it's based on a simple physical mechanism (magnetism) and should work OK for a very long time.  The only thing that might mess it up is dust and dirt between the ball and end of the tube; and if that becomes a problem I could glue a small air filter to the bottom of the piston to junk out.  Maybe I'll be pro-active and just do that up front :).

But the question arose:  would there be enough force acting on the bearing ball to pull it into the end of the tube?   Or would the force be too great so the check valve wouldn't permit the damper to easily open (and therefore cause the drawer to not easily open)?

This looked like another simulation to perform using FEMM, Finite Element Modelling, so I could answer these questions.  Long story short:  it looks good.  The attractive force is small, on the order of 3.9 grams; but since the check valve will be on the horizontal plane it won't take much force to pull the ball toward the end of the tube.  And 3.9 grams over an area of .049 square inches (the cross-sectional area of the tube) indicates that the check valve should open with a pressure differential of just .17 pounds per square inch.

Here's a screen shot of the simulation:

I included a steel plate that will be used to mount my damper on the back of the base unit where the drawer goes, just to make sure it wouldn't cause problems in the operation of the check valve.  And it doesn't alter the results to any great extent.  It does increase the attractive force between the magnet and baseplate, but it still is pretty low, about 14 grams.  That's less than one ounce.  At that point in the operation of the system -- damper plus long-distance magnetic latch -- the attractive force of the mag-latch is MUCH higher so it won't materially alter how the overall system behaves.

Forever Products -- Why Not?

 A significant part of the waste we all send to the landfill are products that fail due to some proprietary component,  or because they weren't designed to be repairable.  Often the bad component can't be replaced because the manufacturer either (A) doesn't offer it  (B) they did but only for a short while; or (C) it isn't possible to replace the failed part because the product wasn't designed to permit that.

All these issues are things that can be addressed in a variety of ways.  While the "right to repair" movement has gained some traction, my examples in the previous paragraph show that it can only go so far -- unless the design process used to make our "stuff" includes the requirement that the item can be repaired for a very long time, even long after the original manufacturer has gone out of business.

Our military has some similar requirements, considering how large their inventory of materiel can be, and concerns regarding the availability of replacements in a wartime situation.  But, considering the concurrent issues of waste reduction and the reduction of resource depletion -- both mineral and energy resources -- and the rather large multiplier of a consumer economy at work -  that also has large implications, given current trends.

So, what's in the way of making products that use off-the-shelf components as much as possible, so they can be replaced long after the manufacturer has declared the product obsolete?  What's in the way of requiring manufacturers to provide design data on their proprietary components for those same products so they can be made with 3D printers?  Many companies these days employ designed-in obsolescence as a part of their business model, so they can sell new stuff.  But that tactic has become a larger and larger problem, given the issues of waste and all the resource-consuming aspects of making new items that, in many cases, aren't any better (often less) than what they replaced.

This is where government has a role to play, basically drawing a line and saying that youse-guys have to clean up your act.  Of course, manufacturers should be able to offer new products with new features:  but they need to both design their products so they can be repaired; or if some unique parts are in there, once they have come out with a new model they have to make the design information available for the older item so replacement parts can be fabricated by a third party, or, if possible, with a 3D printer.

The overall impact of this would be multifold.  For starters, manufacturers that simply "churn" their products so older, but equivalent, products become obsolete, will have a greatly reduced incentive to do so.  To appeal to consumers, new products would only succeed if they offered better functionality, or added functions.  This would promote innovation rather than just putting a different color of lipstick on the same pig.  Of course, the new products would have to be Forever Products too, so the pattern of innovation would continue.  Or maybe some vendors would just offer Forever Products and tap into the demand for something that can be repaired until long into the foreseeable future.

Some manufacturers are very good about providing replacement components for the products they sell, but they seem to be in the minority.  That has to change.

The long-range magnetic latch: simulation oddities.

 While doing additional simulations I got really strange results if the magnet was more than about 1 inch long.  The initial force between the magnet and iron pole piece came out as a negative number!  It didn't make any sense.  Then I started thinking about the simulation "universe".  Part of the initialization needed for the simulation is to define the boundary of the problem, basically how large the space around the magnet and pole pice is.  I'd been specifying a relatively small distance that defined this, because increasing it also causes the simulation time to increase.  Well, it turns out that was a bad idea for some cases.  When I increased the size of my simulation universe, suddenly the force numbers all made sense again -- they all were positive, no mysterious repelling force was present.

Even simulations with shorter magnets that did not exhibit negative force came out slightly different when the boundary distance was increased.

Moral of the story:  even though it can cause simulations to take longer than you like, it's important to make the problem boundary large enough.  Start with a smaller size, then increase it to see what happens to the simulation results.  Look at the results you get with a critical eye to see if they make sense or not.

More About 2 to the millionth power: How Many Digits Does it Have?

Any old scientific calculator can tell you that log(2) is approximately equal to .301030.  The log of 2 taken to the power of one million (2^1000000) is log(2)*1,000,000, or 301030.  It's not trivial to use this number to determine 2^1,000,000 down to the last digit, but it IS trivial to say how _many_ digits the number has.  It is: 301,031 digits (because 10^0 is equal to 1, we need to add 1 to our result, then throw away the non-integer part).

For a simple verification of my assertion, let's take a look at 2^10, which is easy to compute:  it's 1024.  10 times .301030 is 3.01030.  Adding 1 to this is 4.01030.  Taking the integer value we get 4, and that's how many digits 1024 has.

In fact, we can use this scheme for any power of 2.  For example, we know that 2^16 = 65536.  16 times .301030 + 1 = 5.816, so we verify that the scheme works for any power of 2.  The limitation to the approach is the accuracy of the value we use for log(2), which is a transcendental number so it has an infinite number of digits.  But there are some online calculators we can use to get quite a few more digits.  One reports that log10(2) = 0.30102999566398114, which should suffice for determining how many digits 2^N has up to N = 10^17.  According to an earlier post of mine we already know that its least-significant digit is a 6 😀.

By the way, we know that log(2) MUST be a transcendental number because the relationship I described above has to hold for any arbitrarily-large power of N for 2^N.  It doesn't matter if N = 10 or 10^10^10.... 

Magnetic Latch Simulations, Part Two

 I changed my simulation scripts for two variations on a magnetic latch mechanism so I could plot force vs. distance for them.  One is the simple magnet and flat steel plate, and the other is one of my long-range latch designs.  The differences are pretty stark:

The long-range latch force vs. distance plot looks a little bumpy but the important thing to note is that it is exerting pretty significant pull as far away as 1.6 inches, while the simple latch just starts to do its thing at around one-half inch, and even at that distance is far less "strong".

Based on this result I think a combination of my long-range latch and a simple air pneumatic damper to get the soft-close effect should work pretty good.  And there's hardly anything that can wear out.  The most likely failure probably would be the one-way valve, and if that's the case I could easily make one using a bearing ball. Putting a tiny magnet in there to retain a steel ball would enable it to work in any position.  Of course, I'll have to use FEMM to simulate that 😃.

A deep dive: A broken soft-close drawer mechanism and finite-element analysis

 This post really highlights nurd-dom.

For some background, about 11 years ago we built our house.  We included soft-close cabinets for all the drawers -- the kitchen, all the bathrooms and the utility room.  At the time, the cabinet vendor we chose was including soft-close drawers at no additional cost, so of course we got them.

Ten years in, one of the two soft-close mechanisms in our most-often used kitchen drawer failed.  It was the silverware drawer.  The nifty latch mechanism that catches and releases the drawer at the right point broke.  It was just plastic and apparently not really up to the job.  That failure turned out to be pretty minor since the remaining soft-close device was still doing a good job.  However, about a week ago it also failed.  The latch thingie didn't break but it wasn't holding, probably due to wear.  It made a very annoying "sproing" sound every time the drawer was opened, when the latch let go.

Being a DIY kind of person I removed the drawer and examined the mechanism and figured out that it couldn't be repaired, so I just took the broken soft-close mechanism off the drawer slider.  Because the drawer no longer stayed closed I made a simple magnetic-latch using a counter-sunk ring magnet screwed to the back of the drawer and a wood block topped by a piece of steel, screwed to the back of the base unit.  It works to keep the drawer closed but it's really easy to close the drawer too hard so it bangs into the base unit, and in some cases has bounced back out.  I looked at some off-the-shelf soft-close replacements but the only ones compatible with the rest of our drawer hardware were exactly the same design as the one that had failed. I didn't have good feeling about that so decided to look elsewhere.

I started thinking about some kind of damper to slow that final approach so the drawer behaves more nicely when it's closed.  One my goals was to make something that is much more reliable than the original version, so I looked at a type of pneumatic damper to complement the (presumably pretty reliable) magnetic latch.

The basic idea I came up with was to make a piston and cylinder with a one-way valve so the piston could be easily withdrawn but the valve would close when the piston was being pushed back into the cylinder.  Air leakage around the piston would be slow enough to produce some back-pressure and slow the cabinet's entry at the end of its travel.  A rod attached to the piston would extend out so the back of the drawer would push against it and the piston.  To pull the piston out, the end of the rod would have a small magnet.  The magnet would be attracted to another steel plate, this time mounted on the back of the drawer.  Sounds a little complicated, but the idea was to use simple physical phenomena rather than a complicated and fragile mechanical latch mechanism to do the job.

I was pretty sure the damper would work, but the problem then came back around to the magnetic latch.  When the drawer pushes against the piston mechanism the force will initially be fairly high, so the latch needed to be able to exert enough force over about an inch's worth of distance to slowly pull the drawer in against the damper's resistance.  The force between a magnet and a flat plate, my basic magnetic latch design, has an extremely nonlinear relationship with regard to the distance between them.  It starts out very low and stays that way until the magnet is very close to the plate.  I wanted to extend the attractive force, to make my system work better -- or, perhaps, to enable it to work at all.

The thought I had was to make a different kind of steel piece to attract the magnet.  The idea was to make an iron cylinder with a Vee-shaped interior, where the magnet would travel inside to the bottom.  The iron would start out being fairly close to the magnet so the initial pull-in force would be sigificant, but to ensure that the magnet would continue to travel inside the cylinder its interior would be machined to have a V-shaped profile, becoming smaller as the magnet went inside it.  This way the magnetic force would act to continue to pull the magnet into the cylinder.

That geometry looked to be pretty difficult to get right -- it could take a lot of experiments to figure out what would and wouldn't work very well.  So I turned to software, in the form of a magnetic-field simulator called FEMM.  It solves magnetic field problems using a technique called finite element analysis, and one of its features is that it can calculate the force between a magnet and an arbitrarily-shaped iron pole piece.  Perfect....except that I wanted to easily change things like the angle of the V profile, the dimensions of the magnet and other features that I thought might make it all work better.  For simple problems you can create shapes by using your mouse, but that isn't very easy to use when creating precisely-shaped features.  Fortunately, FEMM also can be operated using a basic-like scripting language (called LUA), enabling me to create all the geometry with a program, then run the simulation and display the results, so I could easily change the physical design using a text editor and quickly evaluate the result.  For an example of the program's output, I offer this screen shot:

The intensity of the magnetic field is depicted by colors, where teal is very low and red is high.  In this model, the latch is basically shown from a top view, where the back of the latch is at the top of the screen.  The back of the iron pole structure has a hole in it to reduce the final holding force of the latch.  My simulations showed this worked to get the pull-in force to be comparable to the hold force, which in this case is the force needed to separate the magnet from the back of the pole piece.  It is NOT the same as the "lift capacity" of the magnet as specified by vendors like K & J Magnetics, due to the presence of the hole.

This is a theoretical study -- clearly, a structure with just the magnet and pole piece would be unstable because it would only take a minute offset one direction or another to cause the magnet to snap over to one side or the other of the pole piece, messing up my nice simulation work.  To prevent that, the inside of the pole piece actually will have a plastic insert (cast or machined) to fit closely between the pole piece and magnet.  That will keep the magnet centered so my simulations should be reasonable approximations to what actually happens.  I hope.....

I'm thinking that it may be possible to integrate the damper and long-range latch into one unit, but initial testing will be done using two separate parts to evaluate their separate functions.  One real concern is how to install the pieces correctly, to ensure proper operation.  When the drawer is installed it's almost impossible to see how everything lines up so that problem will need to be addressed.

More later :).