Week 14 Update

For this week, I decided to focus my attention on starting the project report. I wanted to ensure that we had an outline of what we wanted to say. So far, we have advanced greatly in our project report and I am happy that I will have enough time to start on the FEA. Although finals are approaching, I am hoping to get FEA done for the project report. Since we were not able to finalize the FEA before the third presentation, we want to ensure that we finish this semester strong and at least provide most of the FEA needed. However, we are ready to work to on this over winter break if needed in order to focus our attention on manufacturing for the Spring semester.

Week 13 Update

For this week, I focused my attention on the presentation. Since we had Thanksgiving break, I wanted to have everything done as soon as possible so that we would have material for the blog. I finished up the column assembly over the break as I had to redesign it based on Futran's specifications. Below is the image of the rebuilt column assembly.


However, I ran into some issues trying to simulate the assembly on Solidworks, which lead me to falling behind even more on the analysis. For our presentation we lacked some substance due to do this, but I am hoping to finish all of the designs before the semester is over. My teammate and I want to ensure that we finish as much as possible before we have to submit the final report.

Week 12 Update

For this week I focused on re-assembling the column assembly. We had just recently finished up re-designing the column so we wanted to get the assembly done as soon as possible. However, I came about an issue; all of the other parts needed to be reassembled as well. For the next week I am hoping to finish the re-designs in order to get that information on the third presentation. We have been a little behind on this portion of our senior project, but we are also finding that everything is coming together nicely. Below is the assembly that I will be redesigning.

Week 11 Update

For this week, my job was to focus on updating the third rail design so that the supports will be of correct length. Nik from the Interface Bogie Team updated us on how tall the bogie switching wheels would be standing. The original supports for the third rail were 10" long and with the new information they are now roughly 1.5". The third rail also had to be slightly re-designed to ensure that our analysis was optimized.
I am planning to continue with analysis and design for the rest of this week and the next. We want to have as much material as possible for the third presentation. We also want to continue working towards finalizing our design so that there is little to no change from here on out.
One of the only problems I faced this week was created the segmented track, for some reason we could not a get an 8-m radius of curvature. We did however create the concept on CAD to present the idea to other teams.

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.

Week 8 Update

For this week I focused my attention on the second presentation we will be giving on 10/24 (Wed). This presentation was finalized after i performed some FEA on the four different kind of third rail designs. In the end, my partner and I decided to go with the hollow diamond shape; this shape is just a 2x2" square sheet metal beam that will be rotated 45 degrees to get the diamond shape (figure 1). The FEA that was conducted is pictured in figures 2,3 and 4.

 Figure 1 (left): Design for third rail 

 Figure 2 (left): FOS=16 for the hollow diamond-shaped rail
 Figure 3 (left): Highest displacement is 1.31mm 
 
Figure 4 (above): the Von Mises stresses are presented with the highest being around 2.32e7 Pa

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