Team Update 4/23

In this semester, the Fail Safe team has taken on more than just the fabrication of the fail safes. Because the Intermediate Scale lacked a propulsion team, the Fail Safe team took on the task of creating a propulsion system for the bogie. Additionally, we took on the task of fabricating the bogie. At this time, all the components for the bogie and fail safes have been purchased. All components, excluding the fail safes, have been fabricated. Tack welding will be completed on 4/27. Full welds will be completed when steering, braking, propulsion, and suspension has their parts fabricated and test fitted onto the bogie, ensuring that no further changes will need to be made. In terms of the propulsion system, the motor has been purchased and it has arrived. The team is currently working on finalizing the design of the propulsion housing system to determine what other materials are needed. Once the wheel for the propulsion has been purchased, the housing system will be finalized. A basic design has been made, but the team has had some issue with the braking system design changing back and forth. With the arrival of the motor, propulsion will begin developing a code with the thought of potentially utilizing the motor's reverse function as a way to brake the bogie if necessary. The team is set to complete it's part of the project in terms of fabrication. We expect to fully focus on the code for the bogie in the coming week as fabrication will somewhat be halted until other team's components can be tested against the current fabricated design.

Spring Presentation #2

End of Semester Update

Currently, our group is working on assembling our scaled parts with the other teams(steering & braking, suspension and guideway).  As everything is coming together, we are making adjustments to our parts.  Stress analysis is being done to double check that all our parts will not fail once scaled down and adjusted.

Additionally, we are working on our subteam portion of the final report.  As of now, all parts of the report have been assigned to different group members.  Based on our timeline, we are set to finish and submit our portion to the librarians by the December 12th deadline.

Presentation 3

Final Fail Safe Designs

Over the weekend we were able to finish making our designs.  After a lot of trial and error, we finally decided to put the upstop wheel on the bogie.  Keeping it stable would allow it to be more reliable.  It would also move away from only being useful as long as the steering mechanism didn't fail.  We've decided to place it in an empty portion of the bogie that already has a hollow square bar in place.  Additionally, we designed the hooks and placed them on our system.

With our designs in place, we are now focusing on stress analysis.  Also, we are waiting for the other sub-teams designs so we can start putting everything together and making any adjustments to the design to make sure it all fits.  Our current worry is that the upstop wheel may be in the way of the steering mechanism.  The suspension system also may get in the way of the hooks or the third bogie.  We have kept all of this in mind, so we know our designs are adjustable, we'll just need to see where everything goes when assembled.

Today we will be meeting with Professor Furman and Ron so they can give us feedback on our new designs.

New Fail Safe Solidworks Designs

As we started to design the hooks in solidworks, we went through a couple designs to ensure that the hooks would actually catch the way we would want as well as catch even when the track is switching.  Additionally, we met with Bengt on Veteran's day to show our designs to him.  After showing him our design, he agreed with what we had in mind, stating that there wasn't too much else we could do to mechanically catch everything.

At this time, we were finally able to start addressing the upstop wheel, which is a fail safe that we wanted to implement to help stabilize the bogie as it traveled on inclines and declines.  Our main cause for putting off this design was that we planned to add it onto the steering mechanism.  Because we've been unsure of how the steering team would be making their design, we waited for them to finalize everything more.  Since they met with Bengt the same day as our team, we were able to see their most final design and start brainstorming where to place the upstop wheel.

New Fail Safe Mechanism

As per Professor Furman's input, we met again to determine a new fail safe mechanism that would catch the bogie and cabin and keep it from falling off the railway in the case that the steering system failed.  The biggest problem we had when addressing this situation was determining how to create a system that wouldn't change the guideway or the bogie much.  Most of our ideas stemmed from adjusting the guideway, which was greatly discouraged.

After a lot of drawing and discussion, we were able to create hooks that wouldn't require any changes to the guideway and would be able to catch the bogie if it fell in a diagonal and/or downward motion.  The hooks would be attached to near the top of the bogies, to hold on to the guideway if it went diagonally.  There would also be hooks on the bottom that would catch the bogie if it fell downward.  The hooks on the bottom would barely be above the guideway because we needed to keep the displacement low so the impact load would be low, which will put less force on the hooks so they don't break off.