week 3

This week we continued to work on identifying the issues of the previous tracks and see what part needs to be changed or improved. We also communicated with all the small scale teams and we created a group in Slack, which is a online communication App, for easier communication in the future. Everyone was cleared that by the end of the school year, we need 4 loops of track and have at least 5 bogie running simultaneously.

We identified the problem of the tracks with track improvement team and had a conclusion that the second loop needed to be rebuilt because it was poorly manufactured.

Kevin emailed Lilly, who is the administrator of the mechanical engineering department, to get access of room E123 which is the tech shop. Once we get access to E123, we will start getting hands on experience with bending aluminum and see what methods we can use to make each bent uniform.

9/7/2016

              On 9/7/2016, my partner and I looked at the previous work of the track and understood the problem that the previous manufacturing team had faced. We found that the main problem was that the radii of the curved aluminum at the four corners of the track were not equally shaped which makes the bogie stuck or fall during the test run.

              We noted down key information such as where the previous team bent the aluminum, what machines they used and what company they contacted. We talked to Dr. Furman and got some useful contact information that we can ask for help.

              Our next step is to contact these people and companies provided by Dr. Furman to get more information about how the aluminum should be worked. After this, we will either get in touch with the track improvement team and see how they design the tracks, or try to get the tracks from previous semester back to work.