Cold Drink Warm Cup

Hi, we are students from Piedmont Hills high school taking Advanced Manufacturing 2. We are assign to do this as one of our project. The idea of the cup is made by my partner.

My partner's idea process goes like:

One time I was drinking cold milk during the winter because I think cold milk just tastes better than warm milk, but whenever I drink cold milk, my hands get cold and I don't like that :( . so I thought: "what if the cup on the outside was warm, so I can drink my cold drinks, while keeping my hands warm when its cold." cold milk >>>>>>, cold hands in cold weather <<<<<

There, the idea of our cold drink warm hand cup is created.

A way to make a ceramic cup:

This can be a ceramic 3D printer or if you have a really good skill making pottery.

A way to make a wooden cup:

This can be a wood lathe or a CNC machine with 2 operations.

For our prototype, we will be making it with a PLA 3D printer. This is just to prove the concept of our product, but this is not recommended because the micro plastic might be consumed from a plastic cup.

First we need to define our problem. Our goal is to make a warm cup and at the same time keep the drinks cold, so we need a heat insulator as our material. At first, we thought that adding a Thermoelectric module in the cup would be a great idea, but that meant the cup could not be put in a dishwasher. The idea moves on to adding external heat to the cup.

The idea is to make two cups, one for the cold drinks, and one for the warm cup. Then put the cold drink inside the warm cup achieve our goal. Of course, the material is still heat insulator. A material we chose was ceramic, however; two ceramic cups are brittle. So we decided to make the inner cup wood, so it insulate the heat and won't clash with ceramic. The way of adding external heat is by putting the ceramic cup into an oven to heat up the cup.

The warm cup has to be big enough to hold with two hand, so we measure our diameter with two hands making a circle. This made sure the cup is a good size for holding. We made a model in fusion 360 by using that dimension. Then we made the inner cups, and we realized that the cup wouldn't just fit in through friction(image 1). The solution is to make some locating tabs to support the inner cup to guide to the right place, and this also reduce the heat conduction between the cups(image 2). This creates another problem that there is a gab between two cups(image 3), so we made the top of the inner cup thicker to fill in the gap(image 4).

The full fusion 360 model are provide below

The ceramic cup can be made with a ceramic 3d printer to get the detail inside the cup, or it can be made by hand with precision.

The wood cup can be made with wood lathe with precision, and add the handle afterward.

In our case, we will just use a 3D printer to print a plastic model to introduce the cold drink warm cup idea.

The STL file we used is provided below.

The model took about 5 hours to print. The outcome was great, and the tolerance we put in fit perfectly. Then we put the outer cup in an oven to heat up, and put cold milk in the inner cup. The temperature difference was real, but due to the material we used being plastic, the outer cup didn't store a lot of heat. If the cup was made out of ceramic, it would store much more heat in cup and heat up our hands.

Overall, this project was a sudden idea made by my partner, but we mange to make it work. Although this may not been seen by a lot of people, this project is a success for me and my partner. We are here to thank our teacher of assign us to enter this contest, and we do get some experience out of this including prototyping, team work, and refining our design. It is welcome if anyone wants to make the cup out of real material and test it out for us. Thank you!

Lastly, is our ad for our amazing cup that we made for everyone. Hopeful you will made one yourself and be happy about our product. Again, Thank you!