Every single mechanical engineer has to study a subject called mechanics. Some call it MOM, some call it SOM, some call it EM. But whatever you may call it, it's always there and it's always the same. This subject tells us how to decide whether our design will fail or not. And it is a very complex subject. And the bad news is, we only study this until we get familiar with the concept of Simulation. Once you start doing simulations, there is no going back. I had a glimpse of simulation very early in my college life, way before it would have according to my syllabus. And then I got myself involved in another project that made me understand simulation to a very great extend. This was the design and manufacturing of HAWT. Basically, we were trying to make a hybrid wind turbine that can produce electricity safely inside a crowded city. And the very first step included the Fluent based simulations. Actually, the first step was a literature review, but yeah you got the point. So, my s...
While I am working on the Review of the Past series, why not write about some of my initial projects simultaneously? The first project I made as a mechanical engineer was a Speed Reduction Pulley System. If you are familiar with something, you would know that it is not even a proper project. However, as a first-year student who didn't even know what he was doing in engineering, this was the best idea I could get. Actually, this wasn't even my idea, this was my friend's.
If you are unfamiliar, this was basically a few cylinders connected to each other using a rope, the motive of which was to reduce the RPM of a motor to nearly one-third. It was such a basic, and I'll say pointless project that I don't even include it in my resume. Or maybe it was a great project, but we were unable to understand it at all. Anyways, We made it together and it somehow contributed to my future projects.
Image: Final Assembly.
So this was it. The so-called project. I would have included the calculations, but there was no need to do any. We made no design, did no research whatsoever. Even the photo I took was blurred!
But it worked anyway. And we used a motor to drive a conveyer belt (or something like that). The only things I learned at that time were:
- Cutting perfectly circular pieces of larger diameter is a head-ache.
- Gluing wood together is harder than it seems.
- CNC machining is expensive.
However, If I have to make this today, there would be a lot of things I'll be able to learn or implement. Here's how I will do it today:
- Calculate the length of rope for the optimal value of tension without slipping.
- Use bearings instead of greasing the joints again and again.
- Calculate the diameters to attain a given amount of speed reduction.
- Use a motor that doesn't require 3 batteries.
- Make this a variable speed reduction system.
Apparently, I could have learned a lot of stuff. The only problem was I made this project for the sake of grades, and not because I wanted to learn something. This behavior did change in the next few years, and I did make some pretty good projects. But this was a huge disaster at the time.
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