Week 9 Update

For this week I focused on sharpening up our presentation and trying to get some FEA to the Solar Panel Team. I found myself having several issues with the columns provided by Futran when I attempted to perform FEA. I am currently working with David to rebuild these so we can continue on with our analysis and get some information out to the Solar Panel Team.

For the next week, I am hoping to help out with CAD drawings and FEA on these so that we can continue to build material to present to the rest of the teams. We are currently focusing our attention on designing the junction and possibly implementing a different method of curvature. We are looking into welding straight sections to resemble a curve and then using a thin metal sheet to attach to the inside of the curve to smooth it out. This would be opposed to bending the tubing needed for the railing.

I am currently on schedule but am running a little late on the FEA for the column. This is just due to the bad CADs, so once that is fixed I can get that done too.