13. Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income¶

Assignment¶

Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
Prepare drafts of your summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) and put them in your root directory

Mini salt factory will be used to hold workshops for children about the basics of chemical engineering.
I will also seek for opportunities to exhibit it at science related events, or MakerFaire.

This project will only be the start of developing chemical engineering education installation. In fact, there are many restrictions to it.

It distillates salt water, but is not adapted to distillate other things.
It is limited to a physical reaction. No chemical reaction is involved in this process.
It is a simplified distillation tower.
It only covers one process in chemical engineering - distillation, while there are still a lot more.

I want other people to be able to develop this project further.

For example,

to add more details to the distillation process
use the distillation tower to distillate other things
add other processes you would see in chemical plants. Such as heat furnace, reaction tank, etc.

And I do want people to create more and let more learners see and learn from it.

Therefore, the licensing of Mini Salt Factory will be under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

I made a slide based on the 2D CAD I created. This will be substituted by the actual installation.

I wasn’t able to create a video for my final project since it is still in progress. But I drafted this story board for it.

General look: Mini Salt Factory sitting there, distillating ocean water. Condensed salt water dripping from the output pipe. Summary shown on the screen.
Interactive functions: Children interacting with it, changing the parameters. Hopefully some laughters.
Development steps: welding, testing with sensors, circuit board production, 3D printing peralstiltic pump and testing.

Here is a video I made to practise compressing a video and uploading it onto my repo:

I used iMovie to attach the short videos together, and export the whole video in 1080P.

Then I used ffmpeg to compress the video.

This is the line to install ffmpeg:

$ brew install ffmpeg (beware that it takes a long time!!)

And this is the line to compress a video:

$ ffmpeg -i input_video -vcodec libx264 -b:v 1000k -vf scale=-2:1080 -acodec mp2 -b:a 256k -ar 48000 -ac 2 output_video.mp4

1000k represents 10M, but the output actually exceeds that a bit. So I changed that to 900k.