Sweet Collaboration: TU Student, Professor Design Flowing Chocolate Wall For Local Shop

An engineering student and professor at the University of Tulsa have come up with a sweet design for a Tulsa chocolate shop.

The first thing customers see when they enter Chocolate Nosh is a three-foot wide, eight-foot-high flowing wall of chocolate.

Owner and Chocolatier of Chocolate Nosh, Natalie Adams, said she got the idea for a chocolate wall while traveling the United States and Europe. After looking into how much it would cost, Adams decided rather than buying one and having it shipped to Tulsa, she would turn to local experts.

She contacted University of Tulsa Mechanical Engineering Professor Dr. Steve Tipton who enlisted the help of engineering student Georgia Hilburn. He said Hilburn wrote a proposal to get a student research grant to help fund the project.

The pair then got to work making a pump for the fountain and came up with a unique design for the wall. Dr. Tipton said the next step was testing it, so they built a prototype to get the right flow rate for the chocolate. To keep it from hardening Tipton and Hilburn used a mixture of vegetable oil and cocoa for the wall.

Four gallons flow down the wall at Chocolate Nosh every minute. Dr. Tipton said overall the project took about 6 months to complete and was a great learning experience for not only Hilburn but his entire senior design class.

"A lot of times students do not go to the trouble to make prototypes early and test the prototypes and Georgia and I did," he continued saying, "They were able to see this process in action and we were able to get this machine running before the end of the semester."

Dr. Tipton said Hilburn not only gained hands-on experience with this project, but she also tied for first place at a university-wide competition for her presentation on it.

Adams said she was very impressed by their work and the chocolate wall turned out to be everything she wanted.

"We thought that it was unique and that it would bring folks to Tulsa to come and look at this chocolate wall. It is just not anything that you find anywhere else around and we were just really excited about the fact that we could actually build one," she added.

Chocolate Nosh is located near E 61st St. and S Yale Ave. in Tulsa. Adams said the chocolate comes from Belgium, but they also roast their own coffee, have wine pairings, and serve cocktails in the evenings. The shop is open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.