So, I'm a mechanical engineering student, and as such, I make projects. :) So I thought I'd share some pictures of projects with you all.
This is an anemometer (an instrument that tests wind speed and direction). We tested it in the wind tunnel. It worked, but not really that great. Weconnected our ping-pong ball contraption to the rest of the instrument with hot glue. That may be part of the reason it doesn't work so well. We were impressed, however, that it endured a maximum speed of 30 m/s before breaking.
I designed the hat on this man. It had to interface with his head. Obviously, you can't see that part, but that part was really hard. There are several reasons why you would never want to buy this hat though. 1) It's kind of goofy, 2) The way it was designed, (although it is specific to each persons head), it will be really really tight, 3) the surface touching your head is cork. I don't think that would be comfortable.
This is a Wankel Rotary Engine, which happens to be my absolute favorite engine of all times. I just like it. Maybe because I understand how it works a lot better than all other engines. Um...most people think this
picture looks like a door knob. Sad day.
This is a gyroscope. It is entirely made of aluminum. I take that back. The stand is made of steel. Anyhow, this was a poor idea because aluminum rubbing against aluminum while spinning caused this thing to
ruin itself pretty quickly. I guess that's why they make you do projects and then teach you about things like that, to ensure any project you make is really missing important elements. ;)
Once I wrote a a lathe manual for an english class with my friend Skyler. We took pictures of everything to give a visible to the step-by-step instructions. This was once of my favorite pictures.
(Drilling, in case you didn't know.)
I had some cool videos to explain why this circuit is cool, but blogger isn't letting me upload videos. (Maybe another time.) Anyhow, this circuit is a triggering circuit with no particular name. It was supposed to be a Schmitt Trigger, but my professor messed up the instructions on how to build one and everybody built this instead. It still triggers though.
How it works, in case you are interested: You connect a positive and negative input voltage to their respective places on the bread board. The photo transistor (blue pin thing) and the IR transistor (white pin
thing) face each other and are connected with a beam made from the circuit. When the beam is blocked, it triggers the system and (in this configuration) the red LED closest to us in the picture lights up confirming the trigger. We used this in my class to trigger a high speed camera and video tape really fast
processes in slow motion. My group taped popcorn popping. We intended to trigger the circuit with the popping popcorn, but due to a weird refraction of the light through a beaker, we gave up and used our finger to trigger. The videos are cool. I wish I could upload them.
This has nothing to do with engineering, but I made it. It's a quilt piece for a quilt we made for my mother's parent's 50th wedding anniversary. It was fun. It'd been a long time since I'd done any cross-stitching. (In case you can't tell, that's me and Ryan, and the building next to us is BYU.)
The following pictures are a series of pictures taken while building a carbon composite bridge for a competition last May. It was a really cool design. I think it had real potential, but after we thought we were done (and had no time to restart) we learned we were going off of the rules for the wrong year and had to somehow had to cut off 100 grams of material. (In case you are not familiar with composites, they don't way much, so 100 grams is a lot.) We managed to do it, throwing away our intended supports and hoping not to destroy the integrity of the bridge and the bridge placed pretty average in the competition, which do to the circumstances, we were VERY pleased with.
This was our mold.
This is release film. Without it, the bridge would never come off of the mold.
This was in-process. What we were doing was questionable, but we'd done it before and it worked (despite all of my knowledge against doing this to composite material). Mostly, we tried to hide what we were actually doing and later decided that cutting the top surface into tons of different pieces didn't matter because of lots of reasons. I was going to list them, but then decided this was getting long. :)
We clamped it like this overnight to ensure that everything was being held in compression.
We wrapped it very tightly with shrink tape.
We also wrapped it a lot with shrink tape. (This was experimental because when we'd done it before, we didn't have shrink tape.)
This is what it looks like before going in the oven. The yellow bag is a vacuum bag and the spout thing is where you hook the vacuum up. By cooking it in a vacuum, you increase the compression in the material, which is a good thing for all materials I've studied. (Being in compression that is, not necessarily cooking them, although it usually has its benefits depending on how it's done.)
This is our bridge almost entirely out of its mold. No pictures really did it justice.
This was us shaving LOTS and LOTS of materail off of our bridge to get it to fit into the testing requirements.
I suppose that's all for now. Um...sorry that was so long. :)
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