Jinhao Cui's blog

This week, I mainly focused on brainsotrming and finding parts online that could be used in building the bogie. 

This week, we have discussed to reduce our cost of the material, labor cost, and etc. The final decision is that to switch from steel to plywood. However, there are things that we need to focus on choosing the correct plywood. If the plywood we use has avoids, there will be problems when we do laser cutting. Therefore, finding the supplier and get the correct plywood is essential to this semester.

In this week, from the meeting, we basically have a general target on what we need to do for this semester. 1. Most structural parts will be using wood instead of sheet metal. 2.  Joint will be using steel as we designed. 3. Need to think of a new way to make exam whether the wood structure will hold.

This week is a quick review of what we, as full-size bogie team, has done so far. From last semester, the biggest concern for this project is funding. Based on our Gantt Chart, we need about $10,000 to build the desired prototype. This means the bogie can be used in the future and can support 20,000N of weight. From today's meeting, obviously, the budget cannot satisfy our desire. Therefore, there will be a meeting with fundraisers next week, which we can decide how to reduce our cost.

this week, according to our Gantt chart, we are supposed to finish our CAD design. The reality is we still have a lot to do just on CAD design. Servel new ideas are brought up. But consider the complexity of the structures, these designs are denied. This is the current version we have. and new stress analysis of this structure is modeled.

In these two weeks, I have focused on doing the FEA on the whole structure. Currently, I have a general analysis of the whole structure. I did two analyses, one is taking consideration of future weight will be applied on the bogie. The other one is the steering part. In the future, the part will experience a side moment provided by the guide rail.  The above pictures are the result we have. It has shown few parts that we need to change in the future. once the complete CAD design is finished, I should be able to get more results from the FEA test.

In this week, there are few things on CAD design that I have trouble on designing. These need to be solved on todya's meeting. I have able to run FEA test on two important part. this one is the connection between the bogie and the suspension or cart. Overall the deformation is relative low. and the safety factor is above 1. this is the stop, which help to fix the switch wheel only rotate in a certain region. and the safety factor is greater than 1