David-Cabezas_SJSU Spartan Superway

This week, most teams were able to do their first presentation. Unfortunately, our team was unable to go so we could not get feedback on our latest design choices from the other teams. Every team, however, seems as if they are ready to start building their project and prepare it for maker fair. Below is a link to our presentation. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Eki-vqZQgNWR_Ff_LHvOWWdngbZgOFDHx1YnSmC7qXM/edit?usp=sharing The day before these presentations, we were able to cut all of the unistruts for the rail bender. For the base, we decided on double-layering it since the screws ordered were a bit too long for just one board. Most of the unistruts were cut to about 7 inches, except for the sliding unistrust which was cut to 5.25 inches. Next week the team hopes in finishing assembling the railbender.

This week's meeting was mostly devoted to rebuilding prior year's track as it had to be disassembled for the move. However, we seemed to have lost a good portion of the materials originally in place during the move. This includes curves, switch sections, wedges and the entrance rail for the bogey. In consequence of this, we were unable to fully rebuild the track. While putting the track back together, we realized how poorly bent the aluminum rails were to begin with. This further emphasize the need of an accurate rail bender. This meant that not everything fit together as modular parts, which was promised in the previous iteration of the track. Besides the inconsistent bending, sometimes two brackets would not fit together with every metal bracket set. Another issue we came across with is how everything was fastened together. The screw heads were placed on the inside of the rails so that meant to unscrew everything, we had to go in from an angle with a 90 degree bent screwdri...

Today, the team worked on building some of the track sections so we may better visualize what parts we still need and what kind of brackets and rails the switch sections of our track will need. In general, the team will need about 20 3D printed brackets for our new track. At the moment, the team has two straight sections, two curves, and one switch section built. The biggest progression to our project, however, was finalizing our track bender design. The main components worked on was how the system will be supported by u-shaped metal rails, attached to a wooden board through 'Z' and 'L' brackets. Two threaded rods will keep the bender connected to the track and with the help of the bottle jack, apply an axial force to the rails. Two 2x4 wooden blocks will hold up the wheels and a soft material will be placed at the end so when part of the rail slides between the supports, there would not too much grinding between the material. We will accomplish this using thin metal ...

Today, a guest speaker gave a presentation on transportation systems like BART and PRT. He argued that the only way personal rapid transportation could be competitive is for the small-scale team to showcase a professional model that would demonstrate the timing PRT will work under. The problem with this and our current situation with Spartan Superway is the funding allocated to small teams. Because of this, we will continue to build and design the track using aluminum rails and the modular design presented to us from last year's designed. The guest speaker also mentioned a new track design that would show how the PRT system will work between cities. To further elaborate, the track will have a general outer loop where the bogeys can traverse between cities and splits into smaller loops, called "offline stations", where the pod car moves into the specific "city" targeted where it can drop off the riders and recharge its battery (inductive charging in our case). ...

On the 6th of February, the team focused on organizing our new workplace on Terraine St. This came after the whole team helped Spartan Superway move from the old warehouse location. About 3/4 of our parts were stored in a room and we spent our time hauling the old material to our workplace. We realized, however, that some of our parts were missing and still are. We assume that they were taken in for scrap metal so we plan to re-fabricate those parts.  Apart from cleaning up the workplace, the team spent their time on two things. Brandon and I went ahead and laid out the track on the floor so we could get the general sense of the space it would be taken. Second, the team had to re-design the track bender since there were resources that were previously available to us before that aren't now.  For the following week, we plan on continuing to improve the track bender design and to work on rebuilding the previous track. We also hope to have outside access to the location bes...

For this week's meeting, the team was able to present their designs and stress analysis to the rest of the groups. In our presentation, the team was able to exhibit all of the stress calculations done through Solidworks Simulation. The yield safety factor was calculated for the bracket, third rail sleeve, and the straight and decline/incline aluminum rails. For the third rail sleeve, two analysis were done: one where 12 lbs of force was pushing down on the inside of the sleeve to hold up the third rail, and 12 lbs acting on the side to check if it could cushion three bogeys when doing the switch turns. The safety factors were 18 and 16.3, respectively. The safety factor for the bracket was 6, and the yield safety factor for the rails were 3.1 and 1.6.  The rails had a smaller deflection than what the previous calculations gave us of at most 0.02 inches vs 0.08 inches. This means that deflections in the aluminum were minimal and would sufficiently hold up the bogey. The team was a...

Today, most of the groups presented. Half-scale and small-scale were the only teams that were not able to present today. Both the solar team and the full scale bogey team showed improvement in the range of progress from their last presentation. For next week, our team should further prepare for the presentation. I was able to prepare all of our Solidworks FEA for the presentation. Our safety factors for the third rail support was 18 when it was acting as a cushion to the bogey switching tracks. It was 6.3 when it acted as a vertical support for the third rail, meaning that an additional switch support for the track would not be necessary as the piece will not fail under the force of one bogey. The Bracket had a safety factor of 16, meaning that it will still be able to hold up our track. The team is anticipated to further discuss if a bracket of half an inch may be enough for the support in order to reduce print time and save materials. The straight and dip rails both would not d...