Week 8 : Presentation #2

This week we prepared our second presentation.

The presentation includes a new design of aluminum bender.

We calculated several numbers towards the design including force required and shear stress act on the bolts, and spring back effect of the aluminum.

If this bender design works out well, we should expect fabrication to start early next semester.

Week 7: Gathering numbers

This week I looked into the measurements from previous year's design and tried to compare it with the actual tracks they made. We wanted to see what challenges they faced so we will get an idea of what needs to be focused while fabricating.

We are yet to get access to the school machine shop E123, hopefully it will come down during the following days.


measurements :

week 6

This week we decided that our original bender design will be thrown out, and we will use a Hossfeld bender instead which is available in the local tech shop. However i was informed that the tech shop will only be available for one month so that is not going to work. we also contacted Lilly, and she said that the door code for E123 should arrive in a week. I hope that it will get us started on fabricating, otherwise, we will pay for the tech shop membership or classes or whatever is needed in order for us to get into the techshop.

On the otherside, since designing a bender is not a concern anymore, we will start getting informations and numbers about the tracks and bend radius, etc. The main method for us to ben the aluminum strips will be having a 1:1 CAD drawing printed out and ben the aluminum by hand accordingly.

week 5

This week's meeting is the first presentation of the half scale group. I had a good understanding of what they are doing although it is almost completely different from our 12th scale model.

Door request code is still pending. So we couldn't have access to E123 and play around with the machines. 

week 4

This week we worked on our first presentation. We gathered information about bending aluminum strips including different methods and different machines. the machines are around $1000 so we desided to use existing tools to create a method. we took pictures of the current track issue and put it on the presentation. We also requested for the E123 door code and are waiting for Lilly's respond.

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.