GURU GOPINATH PANCHANANAM
Medical Devices | Manufacturing | Design & Prototyping
Medical Devices | Manufacturing | Design & Prototyping
I'm a Mechanical Engineer with two years of hands-on experience in medical device design, manufacturing, and production engineering. At Phoenix Medical Systems, I worked on neonatal care products end-to-end — from CAD and prototyping to tooling, quality control, and production transfer in an ISO 13485 regulated environment.
I am currently pursuing a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, with a focus on additive manufacturing, sensor development, and process optimization.
Smart Radiation Devices (SRDs) regulate thermal output by switching their surface emissivity with temperature — low emittance when cold, high emittance when hot. Their efficiency depends entirely on this change in emittance (Δε), but commercial emissometers are expensive and not always optimised for thin coated fabrics. The goal: design a portable, repeatable measurement device for evaluating ZnO-coated thermochromic textiles being developed in the lab.
First working device built around a glass desiccator, with twin silicon flexible heaters mounted on a perforated ceramic plate. It validated the Stefan–Boltzmann measurement approach, but the curved geometry and limited vacuum quality made consistent thermal isolation difficult.
Redesigned as a sealed acrylic vacuum chamber with two heaters, sample clamps, and three thermocouples. The symmetric layout enabled true comparative measurement against a black-body reference and was modelled in Creo from the ground up.
Constructed in-house from acrylic sheets sealed with chloroform and adhesive. The build used two 12 V, 25 W silicon flexible heaters driven by independent DC supplies.
Three K-type thermocouples measured sample, reference, and ambient temperatures. Heatsinks were added beneath each heater to prevent overheating, while custom sample clamps improved repeatability and alignment inside the vacuum chamber.
Two materials were tested under vacuum — bare cotton fabric and ZnO-coated cotton fabric — using the comparative Stefan–Boltzmann formulation:
VBIB − VTIT = σA(T4 − TC4)(εB − εT)
Validation: The measured value for bare cotton (0.87) closely matches the published literature value of 0.88 (Morgan et al., 2011), confirming the device's accuracy. The expected Δε between coated and uncoated fabric was demonstrated quantitatively for the first time on lab-grown ZnO textiles.
