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...
This was the first real project we ever made. Our university had allocated some funds for green initiatives inside the campus, and one of our seniors had an idea. He thought of making an 8 seater cycle bus. And I along with my friends started working under him. We started by deciding the orientation of the passenger. Then we worked on the mechanism to transmit power from eight different pedals to one driving shaft. And slowly, we kept on solving every problem and finally came up with a chassis. Somehow, this project made me understand Solidworks in a way I couldn't even learn by studying or from Youtube. I did my first simulation on Solidworks as well.
The project also helped us all to understand why we were studying all our subjects. We had to do calculations for the turning radius, gear ratios, transmission mechanism, clutch mechanism, and whatnot. We designed the chassis, simulated it, removed unnecessary components, and then repeated everything until we reached the most optimum design. This project made me learn so much more than what I had learned in my one and a half years of studies. And after all the efforts, We came up with this chassis.
Image: Chassis of the Vehicle in Solidworks
We also had hand made drawings for the seat and the mechanisms, but we didn't include the mechanism in the design. This was the first time I realized that not everything is required to be modeled on CAD software. We kept working day and night on this, and finally, we came up with a proposal for our university. And that's when I understood the most important thing. No matter how many efforts you put in, anything can fail. We weren't allocated any funds for manufacturing. Apparently, we didn't even get any response from the university for months. And at last, we assumed that the funds were canceled. We never were able to reach the manufacturing phase, but the things we had learned were far greater than our failure. This project was the one that made me participate in Formula Student. Little did I know that we will fail there too, but that's a story for another post. Right now, Just know that the knowledge you gain from practical projects will always be far greater than you can get from books.
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