11/02/2013

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Reflection - Week 8

Our project status – Steven Kung

Our team decides to submit GR3 report on next Monday and each team member has started to write contents for activity. Also, we are trying to do some simple experiments to test our mechanism design. We bought two pieces of glass, brush scrapper and deicer from the auto part store and put the glass in the refrigerator to make ice on it. With deicer spraying, we test whether brush work or not. On the other hand, we start to create another survey to understand aspect of aesthetic and ergonomics. Two of us will use solidwork to draw the engineering drawings for our product, such as assembly drawing or part dimension drawing. And we will take the drafts to Bob, checking its feasibility. Manufacturing and validation plan can be carried out after we finish the CAD.

Existing/interesting finding – Queenie Lou


This week, we started to work on our gate review 3. We bought the glass as the prototype of the windshield and we use chamber to get ice on the glass as the experimental condition for our material and calculation. We did lots of experiments and we find the material of the brush we wanted to install first is not solid enough to swipe the ice off. We tried several brush and finally we found the good material for our brush. After getting the right material, we started to measure the force and we got the normal force is between 4-6 lbs and resultant force is around 8 lbs. After the experiment, we discussed about our design and started to work on the cad drawing and manufacturing plan. Ice-breaker wanted to finish the first draft for our gate review 1 before next Monday and then we will have enough time to revise and develop our report and finish it in perfect like last time. Go ice-breaker!!

Challenges - Ivan Manuel

At this point, we found a lot of challenges in preceding our project. The biggest one I think is making a solidworks CAD model since none of us are really expert on it, and still need to do online tutorial in making one. We are also still unsure of how the device would look like, what kind of actuator would we use (DC motor or dynamo kit), where to locate each components, and so on. Second, is doing the testing experiment in determining the best rotational movement. Some group members think a rotating head brush just like an electric toothbrush would work best, while the others pitch an idea of making a bunch of fin on the stick handle which rotates and hit the ice on the screen perpendicularly. However, it was intuitively decided that this second method has a higher risk of damaging the windshield, and therefore its not being pursued any further.  The third challenge would be synchronizing the GR3 activities, since one activity need to wait for the other activity to be completed.

Future Plan - Yaqi Huang

Based on the experiment we did this week, we decided to use deicer liquid first to loose the ice and then use brush to clear the windshield. Also we decided the motion of the brush was rotation. The next step is to do another experiment by a force sensor to detect the force the brush needed. Once the force is decided, the motor can also be chosen. The next week we will focus on the CAD and the paper work for the Gate Review 3. For the CAD part, we need to do the 3D model as well as engineering drawings. With the engineering drawings, we can make manufacture plan. The plan will help us to produce the product in the next stage. For the paper work, we will do some calculations to show why the product was designed like that and give more details about the product.

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