A composite of three stages of color setting into Colorwalk’s discs.

Professor Jason Williams and his students of Penn State Behrend’s plastics engineering department are nearly finished molding the individual components of Lauren Herzak-Bauman’s piece, titled Colorwalk. They began fabrication in early fall of 2019 but were set back a few weeks following technical difficulties with the machine. Now that the issue is resolved, however, the students are back working hard in the lab.

I was able to visit the lab last week and see the process unfold. The experienced students make it all look much simpler than it is: add a dye to the material, load it into the machine, press start, and next thing you know – you’ve got a handful of pink plastic discs. After taking a look at the machine monitor, however, it’s obvious there is much more to it than meets the eye. The machine can output four complete discs in about 90 seconds, or roughly 160 per hour. That means all in all, the students will have worked at least 50 hours in fabrication time alone to complete the 8,000 or so discs needed for Lauren’s project. That doesn’t account for setup time or the time spent troubleshooting the machine either.

 

 

“We’re really just doing it in our free time,” said Rebecca Olanrewaju, one of the PLET students heavily involved with the project. “It’s not part of a class or lab, but still a useful experience for us.”

While 50+ hours is a lot of free time to be spending on an extracurricular project, the students assured me this was time well-spent. Once the machine is up and running, their responsibility generally lies in monitoring the machine, process and material levels. This leaves them somewhat free to complete other classwork and/or projects while the machine does its thing.

Here you can see the end product as it is ejected out of the machine into the collection bin:

 

 

We would like to thank the plastics engineering students and faculty for the time and effort put into this project. Now that fabrication is nearly complete, Colorwalk is set to be installed Sunday, November 3rd near Erie Hall at Penn State Behrend.