Our final product is shown here with its BOM in a technical drawing. We were able to make the product out of simple materials that would be readily available to most anyone in Africa.
Our final product was created in Solidworks 3D modeling software. Our intention was to remove the panning for gold from the river to move it to anywhere else to help prevent erosion of the river beds to improve the water quality. We have a hand pump that moves the water from the bottom bucket back to the top bucket which is not shown. This process overall will save water and increase the available area of searching for gold for the zimbabwean people.
The team here is putting together the spray shower head that will help with the filtering of soil in search for gold.
The hand pump is shown here working to transfer the used water back to the top of bucket while we were running water flow tests.
More tests were taken to find out how easily the soil was broken up by the shower head to help with the filtering process. The shower head used gravity for its water pressure which made the project as simple as we could make it at the time.
We had purchased some "prospecting dirt" from e-bay that had no guarantee of containing gold. After running our sluice system we were able to find and collect small shards of gold which made our project a success.
To better show the amount of gold we found in our small bag, we held it against a normal USA Pennies. The gold prices out to be approximately $7.
I for one am proud of our final design for the project. Here is our final analysis of our product is displayed here on our summary board for the college Design Expo that we hold every year to showcase all of our hard work. It show our whole process from the beginning problem statement to the end results.
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Sopmore Design Project
In my sophomore design class, our project was to make a micro economic kit for a third world country. Our target audience was Zimbabwe, Africa. We designed a water recycling sluice tray system to help pan for gold which is one of the ways for individuals to earn a living.
