9/21/16

This week we are focusing more on specifications of how we will construct our new test track. Ron guided us towards how we should be tackling our tasks for the next couple weeks and we've brainstormed what to do if a car should crash into one of the support beams. The list of possibilities can be found on the Full Scale blog: http://fullscaletesttrack-2016-2017.blogspot.com/

We've decided on a layer of aluminum surrounding a layer of protective foam surrounding the support beam. I had thought it would be a neat idea to combine the two layers by using 

Duocel® aluminum foam, which is porous aluminum. Here are the specs:

Upon further research, this would've been too costly and perhaps not strong enough to withstand the force of a car crash, which we estimated to be around 3,336,000 N of force. Thus we decided on aluminum, which is ductile yet light, on the outside. The inside would be some kind of foam so the vibrations from hitting the aluminum wouldn't shatter the beam itself. Some materials we're looking at are HR polyurethane (commonly used in mattresses) and ethafoam. For future use, we thought we might contact this company http://www.houseoffoam.net/contact.htm for assistance because they're local.

Next, I need to design a test track rough estimate of a model on SolidWorks. Since none of us know the dimensions of the bogey, it'll be interesting to see how our models turn out.