David-Bunker-SpartanSuperway

This week mainly consisted of working towards our first presentation and discussing possible issues that may arise when we build our design next semester.   Our biggest manufacturing issue seems to be the rails themselves. The image below shows the Futran rail design used in the guideway. It's a great design for reducing costs as it is made with four interlocking steel plates that are cut and then bent to shape. There are two problems that we realized with this design for our work. First we have not seen any Futran designs for this type of track that are curved, and do not know if they even have one. If we just modify the design to be bent manufacturing it on the small scale we need will likely not be within our budget. As the straight section is made from cut, and then bent metal, it would likely be impossible to bend them into curved section without a roll forming setup. The other issue we face with this design with the junction itself where the rails much merge.  Wit...

This week's work proved to be a bit of a challenge. As our project this year relies on the efforts of previous years, we have to take their designs and efforts into consideration.  While it has been easy enough to read their final reports, it has been a challenge to find all the SolidWorks files that we need to continue this project. Last year's full scale track team originally aimed to design the curved portion of the track in the Fall, that we are now working on, but seem to have completely changed their focus by the end of the Spring semester to designing a better support structure for the track to improve rigidity. So while I had no problem finding their final support structure design files, it was much more difficult to find the various files for the track itself. This problem was compounded by the number of different folders with various SolidWorks files contained in their team folder. Many of these folder held duplicate files, making it confusing to sort through, with ...

This week we aimed to figure out the some of the things that we must take into consideration as we work on our design, as well as dug further into the drive from last year's team. In order to make sure our design is compatible with the Bogie and the passenger pods, there are a few measurements that we are going to need to have finalized to make sure our design is safe. The few things that I came up with that we are going to need are the width and clearance necessary for the passenger pods so that any support columns do not interfere with them, as well as the smallest allowable turn radius of the bogie, and if the bogie is wider than the track itself. The turn radius of the bogie is important as we cannot make our junction, or curved tracks, any tighter than that radius, and the width is important as we will likely need to support the point of the track junction from above, but must leave enough clearance so that the bogie does not hit it.

Over the past week I have been going through last year's reports from the full scale track team and supports and railings team, as well as the summer group's track expansion team. Based on what I read, as well as the recommendations to futures teams from the reports, I think there are two things that the full scale guideway team should focus on this year. First I think that we need to review the summer team's design on the track junctions, and finalize either their design, or a all new one. The team did great work over the summer, but as their goal was to add the expansion to the wooden system that was built last year, their design focused on expanding that model. While we can use, or base a new design off of their work, we also need to ensure we design the junction with long term use in mind, out of metal, and ensure that the bogie cannot physically fall off the tracks at any point. Secondly, we need to make progress towards designing the curved portions of the track. ...