Commercial centrifuge disassembly

[jurra]

Hi everyone 😄 we tear down an eppendorf. This is the link with the images.

I encourage you to think about why is it designed like this. Here are some notes and reflecting about it.

There are several characteristics that pop up:

• The rotor is a machined piece of metal, quite heavy and it has 24 holes for samples of 1.5ml.
• The motor is huge! It is quite big to be able to rotate such a heavy piece of metal. Imagine the torque and rotational inertia this baby generates.
• Along with that, this brings some safety issues related, and the control of the motor can be a challenge.
• I suspect that this same motor and circuitry can be used in other eppendorf models and they reuse the motor + circuitry, adding more circuits.

Any re-design ideas?

[amchagas]

+1 for using Ifixit tools for teardowns :)
Now, in all seriousness, this tells us quite a few interesting things I think.

First, we should be very careful with this design (as you already mention) based on sheer force/speed of the motor. Also because from the photos, there is some high voltage going on in the board, and the motor most likely runs directly on 230V AC?

I don't know if this will be necessary for your design as well, but worth keeping in mind.

another thing is that a quick google leads to the developer of the centrifuge drive https://www.hanning-hew.com/en/products/driving/

And

https://www.hanning-hew.com/en/assets/template/Medien/Dateien/Downloads/Englisch/hew-brochure-centrifuge-en.pdf

Might be worth contacting them and seeing costs for this part? and then developing things around it? Maybe not ideal from the "vendor lock in" it will create, but nice to get an idea on manufacturing costs of these systems?

One question that I have is if you folks have an idea on how old that centrifuge was/is? when was it produced? Maybe technology has evolved since and one can use simpler designs/motors?

[jurra]

Nice points @amchagas it seems like the technology is old. I will look in more details into your points. It is also good in general to understand also how these products and base technologies evolve :)