Three leakage and condensation problems
Water appearing outside a SLUSHi vessel did not always have the same cause. The work separated residual slush at the spout, leakage at the rear seal interface, and condensation on the vessel exterior.
Spout
Slush retained after dispensing could melt and resemble a leak. Removing contact area also reduced engagement with the rubber seal.
Rear seal
Poor engagement between the seal and unit caused leakage in first-article inspection units.
Condensation
The cold vessel exterior collected moisture that dripped down the side, near internal and user-interface electronics.
My work: geometry development, prototype evaluation, and design changes supporting the tooling path. The constraints included existing assembly access, rubber-seal engagement, and injection-molding requirements.
Seal geometry & engagement
For the spout, reducing the surface in contact with residual slush helped drainage. Removing all of the lower material, however, sacrificed seal engagement. The selected geometry balanced the two functions rather than maximizing either in isolation.
Reduce liquid retention while preserving enough geometry to engage the rubber seal.
At the rear of the vessel, the prototype had to fit around partially accessible mounting features and clear the evaporator barrel. Contoured holes and flexibility made it possible to evaluate the change within the existing assembly.
Prototype testing
The rear-interface FDM prototype reduced leakage by over 90% in the documented prototype test. That result supported a production tooling change. It is a prototype-test result, not a stated fleet-wide failure-rate reduction.
For side condensation, I surface-modeled a gutter that routed water toward a front tab and away from the electronics. The design included 2° draft for injection molding. A clear SLA prototype made the water path visible during evaluation.
Results & tooling changes
The work produced a compromise spout geometry, a rear-interface tooling change, and a validated path for redirecting condensation. Each addressed a different physical mechanism.
How to interpret the result
The supplied project record reports the prototype improvement and tooling actions. It does not include sample counts, leakage measurement units, or long-duration reliability results; those are not implied by the percentages shown here.