Week 7 Update

For this week, I focused on curving our track and implementing the third rail to get a conceptual design. This design was needed to add to our presentation next week, so I spent a lot of time trying to perfect that curve. Our design is not the best, but we wanted to at least have a representation for the presentation and also to show to other groups so they can have an idea of our design.

I also focused on the third rail system and am hoping to start some FEA on this so that we have more to talk about during the presentation. I am still familiarizing myself with ANSYS and SolidWorks FEA, so I am hoping to have that done before the weekend so that I am right on track for Presentation #2. As of now, we are going to be implementing the triangular third rail and that provides a flat surface for the supports to be welded onto (figure 1). We want our third rail to withstand flexing and the force that the bogie will be exerting onto it. I believe that using the triangular shaped third rail will help with these because the supports will be welded onto a flat surface versus being welded onto a triangular shape (figure 2).

  Figure 1 (left): The top of this rail is triangular

Figure 2 (left): The third rail design we will be

                                                                                                                 implementing. The supports are also shown