9/28/16 - Paseo Prototyping Challenge

This post refers to the Paseo Public Prototyping Challenge. The purpose is as follows:

The Paseo Public Prototyping Challenge is designed to incubate solutions to pressing social and environmental problems through multidisciplinary collaboration and technological innovation.

Multidisciplinary student teams from San José State University will be selected, mentored, and provided seed funding to develop civic innovation prototypes for presentation at the Paseo Public Prototyping Festival – an arts, culture and technology festival held at the newly opened SJSU/ Hammer Theatre Center in Spring 2017.

I attended the launch on 9/21/16. Here are some dimly-lit pictures proving that I was present:

              

The launch began with several important people discussing how important it is that people collaborate to fix a problem within the community. I've listed the speakers below.

• Dr. Lisa Vollendorf, Dean of College of Humanities and the Arts
• Danny Harris, Knight Foundation Program Director
• Paul Lanning, VP of University Advancement
• Sid Espinoza, Director of Philanthropy and Civic Engagement at Microsoft

These people all had the same general message. San Jose focuses on tech and innovation, yet our community is filled with rising housing prices and homelessness. We are the next generation of change and the leader of social movements. We need to shift our political attention to sustainable cities. Goal of zero bike and pedestrian deaths. Basically, this challenge is supposed to be the appeal to young people to fix the problems that the old people created, as is the case often for engineers. Our challenge is to prototype something cool with the chance to win $10,000. They even gave out raffle prizes of Intel Arduino and Edison and a Microsoft Edge 4. Personally, I think the raffle prizes were unnecessary and the event was a bore. But the cookies afterwards weren't half bad.

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.

9/14/16

Updates

I'm very relieved that we've finally been given some guidance on what exactly is the goal of our project. It was strenuous to be tasked with a completely new project that none of the teammates had any knowledge on. I'm sure over time we'll become more accustomed with vibrations, but it's still very daunting right now.

I'm excited to start designing what the new guideway will look like, though I'm a bit disappointed it won't incorporate any changes in bogey design, since we have to use the current bogey in our testing. (It has a ton of wheels!) SolidWorks will be fun to use again, and I'm interested in learning more about the built-in load testing features. I'm especially interested in learning about shock absorbers and integrating them into the new suspension design. It will hopefully turn out well! I'm a little apprehensive that I've been chosen as the team leader, but hopefully my team will be there throughout the whole process to support the work we're doing together.

Failures/Successes from Past Work

My name is Winter Saeedi. Here is a picture of myself.

My project team will be working on the full-scale test track, which involves footings, columns, guideway, and expansion joints. My interests mainly lie within the realm of vibrations and acoustics, so we’ll see how well these topics merge.

This blog post focuses on the failures and successes from past work that relates to my project team. As a disclaimer, I have no past work that relates to this team project. However, I hopefully have sufficient skills and education relevant enough. I have a background in music and I’ve taken plenty of physics and engineering classes, so the foundation has been laid out. Furthermore, I spent this past summer interning at Seagate Technology, so I have work experience in a technological field. At Seagate, I worked on several projects relating to the sputter tool conveyor system. My team recognized that my aptitude was centered around mechanical design, so I designed numerous parts using SolidWorks, and was able to follow these parts from conception to manufactured deployment.

I will be focusing on vibrations for this year-long project so I hope to gain valuable skills surrounding this topic. I’m concurrently taking the course on Vibrations and Controls, so I’ll be learning a majority of the information throughout the semester. One of my greatest challenges during my internship with Seagate was that I lacked the knowledge necessary to further the complexity of the projects I worked on. Sure, I learned best by immersing myself into projects unknown, but it was much more difficult than already having the knowledge beforehand. I’ll be recreating that scenario again through my work with Superway.

In the past, I’ve also worked on a few group projects in several various college courses. In my design class last semester, my team designed a pedal-powered baby rocker, utilizing our knowledge of geometric, force, and stress analysis. We learned as the class progressed, so while the task was daunting at first, ultimately we finished with a viable model and plethora of new information. I look forward to learning more about the basics of the guideway and furthering my knowledge on top of that to become a worthy team member of Spartan Superway.