Selection of Class Projects

Task Completed: Designed and manufactured a precision desktop lathe able to cut with a <50-micron repeatability. It further passed three "death tests": dropping the machine from waist height, hitting the spindle with a sledgehammer (where the workpiece is held) to ensure the first failure point was an easy-to-replace bearing, and standing on the cross-slide of the lathe while actuating its motion in both horizontal directions.

Application: Advances in industries such as medicine and electronics often require precise components with low tolerances.

Skills Obtained: Design of machine elements, considering stiffness, flexure design for precision movement (using Jon Hopkins' FACT method), experiment and modeling, functional requirements.

More Information: Project description and cutting demonstrations.

Overall goal: Develop a series of RC cars to interface with a single interchangeable control box, and race using one car body per lap.

Skills Obtained: Component design (SolidWorks) and integration, manufacturing including injection molding, thermoforming, waterjetting, machining, and assembly, collaboration on a team for a large project.

Result: 1st place in the race!

More Information: Project report.

Overall goal: Developed a robotic vehicle to remotely survey fish populations at the Duke Marine Lab.

Application: To assist in research of marine populations and by automating processes and data collection.

Skills Obtained: Machine design with customer interaction, manufacturing, watertight construction, testing buoyancy and stability, modeling (SolidWorks), collaboration on a team for a large project.

More Information: Final presentation, and poster with description of mechanical components.

Overall goal: Use insights from solving dynamics equations to design and make a winning racecar propelled only by gravity on a set track. (We won second place!)

Outcome:

• Established theoretical description of motion of pinewood derby car on a track of set slope and dimensions

• Created MATLAB time-marching Euler simulation to predict race time based on input parameters of vehicle weight, position of the center of mass, and dimensions. Predictions matched measured race times within 0.05 seconds

• Examined theoretical results to design and construct a Pinewood Derby car that finished in the top cars of our class section and advanced to the Final Race between class sections

More Information: Link to project report.

Overall goal: Develop a control system with an electromagnet to levitate a magnetic sphere inside a frame.

Outcome: A negative-feedback PID controller achieved position control for static height locations and for moving the ball along sinusoidal and square waves.

Skills Obtained: Electromechanical control systems, PID control, Simulink.

More Information: Link to project report.

Overall goal: Wire a load cell to a stabilizing circuit and LabVIEW control with modulation/demodulation and FPGA to accurately measure weights.

Skills Obtained: LabVIEW and myRio, electrical measurements with oscilloscopes, circuit design, analysis of measurement linearity and drift over time.

More Information: Coming soon.