Karolina Rak - Manufacturing & Design II

DESIGN & MANUFACTURING II

Electro-Mechanical System

Sept 2019 - Dec 2019, for Mechanical Engineering course MECHENG 350: Design & Manufacturing II. Design and manufacturing of 4 bar linkage system.

Background

The goal of the project was to design, build, and test a powered mechanism that will automatically sense targets that pop up on a pre-made playing field and shine light on their corresponding photosensors.

Design Goals

Design a 4-bar linkage system minimizing the transmission angle (defined in this course as the effectiveness of transferring motion and force to the output link, which is the angle between the coupler and follower link in the image on left).
Manufacture quality pieces of mechanism and assemble well
Keep mechanism weight under 5lb.
Score maximum amount of points on playing field during competition.

Team 56 Final Testing (2).MOV

Results

My team successfully designed a basic electro-mechanical system. We used SolidWorks, ADAMS, and other software to model, simulate, and prototype mechanical system during design process. Our linkage pieces were waterjet, then machined further using a manual mill. A few pieces dedicated to base support required the use of a manual lathe. All team members were involved in manufacturing as well as creating manufacturing plans for the various pieces of our linkage.

Our team scored very high in relation to the rest of the course (top 10 out of >32 teams). Our final greatest transmission angle was 19 degrees and the mechanism weighed 2.2lb. We were also asked to show our linkage system in our University's Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Symposium (image below) along with 2 other teams from the course. The symposium is meant to show off "exceptional undergraduate students", so the opportunity was a great honor for us.

Reflection

Overall I was happy with the outcome of this project, my team worked diligently on our mechanism and had a creative approach to navigating the obstacles on the playing field we were given. Some of us were introduced to PID control for the first time. We attempted to optimize the different constants for our system but still ended with some chatter during competition (in above video). If we were given more time, I would've investigated this further to determine the source of the chatter and continue to optimize the speed of our linkage system.

Full team for project at the Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Symposium starting from top left: Chun So, Adeline Wihardja, Nathan Stoetzel, Jia Chen Wee, and myself (kneeling)