Jinhao Cui's blog

In this week, our team basically has a general CAD drawing for the bogie system. There are few things that we can adopt from Futran's design. Such as using a tilted bar connection to increase the grip force. in the next few week, we hope to have a detailed CAD drawing, so that we can work on the FEA test for each part. 

During this week, what I had been focusing on is the general CAD design. There are few obstacles need to be solved. First, dimension is one important part of this whole project, set a detailed dimension can be very helpful in future design. Currently, I have trouble on thickness of the main wheel and motor. other dimension need to confirm with the team is the connection object, which locate between shaft and support plate (for motor and switch wheel). Second, I need to get the new edition Solidworks, so that I can use both school's computer and make edit on my home laptop. Below is the review of my current design.  

in this week, we'll start the CAD drawing based on our current design sketch. Current sketch: Current CAD model we have: ball bearing

this week, we will start to CAD the bogie model based on our previous drawing and data from futran. There are few things that we need to discuss in our group meeting. First is dimension for the major parts, like the wheel, the overall width, height, etc. We also need to corporate with track team for these dimensions. second is the basic sketch. Even though we have our own sketch, but since we are making improvement on Futran's design, we still need to at least have a futran's bogie design sketch to make sure they are what we thought. In general, we'll be following these diagram on our bogie design.   

This week, I'm focusing on finding more design details from what Futran team posted. So far, I couldn't find and know how their bogie system works exactly. What we have and guessed is only based on few videos they have posted. so far, we have done few sketches based on the videos. these sketches is helping us have a better understanding on the existing design.

This is the second week of the class. After the first week presentation, I have a general idea of the track and the full scale bogie system. Based on research, our bogie system is mainly based on the Futran project. From the video above, me and my team have a general idea of how it works.  Based on pictures and video demonstration, we think there are only five wheels exist. One as driver, and the other four are to fix the cart onto the track. There is a huge improvement on the number of wheels, compare with the design we have right now. Still without the futher information from the Futran team, we still cannot make sure our guesses. There are design problems we need to solve and make sure the cart runs smoothly when changing lanes. Dan propose an idea as the following picture shows. A small gap will occur when second lane shows. As long as the gap is small, it shouldn't cause any major safety problem. Also the cart will run in a relative high speed, therefore the da...

This week is mainly focused on researching on existing or similar project like Spartan Superway. Based on research, I noticed few different aspects especially on how they fix the cart onto the track. There are few similar concepts as Superway exist in Japan and German. However, the existing project in Japan and German is hanging monorail. Compare to Superway, these designs are less flexible.  This graph here is one concept this is an image of current hanging monorail in German.  the image above shows a new idea of bogie system. In the future, we might be able to use some of the concept from it.