In order to run the engine test bed over long periods of time, the aged oil in the system must be exchanged for an upgrade. One of the tasks that our team accomplished this week was driving over to PepBoys and buying Shell Mysella Diesel oil. Even though our system runs primarily on natural gas, the difference between Diesel oil …
The UCI SAT II team is focused primarily on designing all the components and creating CAD models for all the components. During week 4 the teams where created, having a more structured composition than before. Team Leads are still being confirmed, a new attribute that the new members are learning is the use of trello. The team has also learned …
Its been a while since our last blog but to recap we won the Deans Choice Award. There were over 40 MAE projects at Winter Design Review and we were one of few to receive the award. Since then we have started to build a whole new VTOL platform. With an addition of about 10 new mechanical engineer members, we …
Since our testing finished last quarter, our focus has now shifted to analyzing our results and presenting them. For the first few weeks, we plotted the resulting G-force magnitudes for the various pressures and speeds of our water polo balls and calculated the average impact force for each pressure and speed. We also compared the average impact force experience with …
The manufacturing and testing of the electrolyzer proved to be more problematic then we originally thought. We initially tried to fabricate a five plate design keeping in mind that surface area was our number one priority. We began the initial stages of system testing and quickly ran into design problems that we did not initially account for. Such Issues included …
For the week of 4/12/15-4/18/15, the broken bolts from the engine’s damper were successfully removed so we proceeded with using the original fan belt system. The dimensions of the fan belt were estimated by the group with measuring tape and reassured with the owner’s manual to be a 50” Green V-belt. The belt was easily purchases at Pep boys for …
Though we have had the engine up and running for several weeks now, it is important that we keep the engine cool while operating for long periods of time. Determining a solution to our broken fan belt sheave became the top priority for the start of the quarter. There were three primary options for consideration with regard to the fan: …
This week the Tail Team of the Human Powered Airplane project worked on testing the deflection of the 26 foot tail boom and checking the movement of the rudder controls. We did this in order to get an idea of how the tail boom would react during flight and see if it could actually control the airplane. Using a force …
This week was all about finishing our testing. By the end of last week, we had mostly finished the water polo tests and so this week we focused on soccer. For soccer, we tested pressures of 5, 7, 8, 9, and 11 psi (the average is 8 psi). We launched these balls at each pressure at the Anthropomorphic Test Dummy …
The 2015 Winter Quarter Intergroup Peer Reviews were held on February 19th and 20th. Student teams presented their Senior Design Projects to an audience of their peers and were scored on a multitude of project performance requirements. The dynamic interactions during the questions and answers sections made these review sessions highly engaging and educational. Here’s Chris Jenkins from Advanced Combustion …
