Hey everyone welcome back to yet another blog 👻
Yes I am finally back again!
During this two week I had lots of memorable experiences with my classmates:0
I am the one holding up a little mazed I did!
I'll be showing you all the progress we had these two weeks mainly on the operating procedures and mechanism that we learnt and a very exciting practical 4 in week 15. So... sit back relax and enjoy some 👌 content :)
⛭⚙Operating principle⛭⚙
Operating principle... sounds familiar doesn't it? It is all around us working passively in our daily lives. This terminology means the basic understanding of how an equipment/machine functions and run. All apparatus and equipment are usually design based on 4 main category;
Electrical🗲 (working with electricity and electrons),
Mechanical⚙ (working with gears or motors),
Chemical🧪⚗️ (dealing with reactions and energy) and lastly
Magnetism🧲( working with north and south poles and voltages)
Examples💡
1.Separation principle of distillation: difference in volatility
2.Separation principle of liquid-liquid extraction: The solubility of solute in solvent
3.Brewing of coffee: solubility of solid in solvent
4. Air-lift pump (same as the one from coffee maker): the principle of buoyancy
Chemical product👀
My teams chemical product is a saviam machine that creates plant-based meat for our audience and we deduced that our machine uses and actuator, a mechanical working principle enhanced by a mechanism. This is observed at the motor of our machine.
Mechanism🔩
What is mechanism? It is actually a part of equipment or an addition to enhance the principle through mechanical movement. These mechanism are very common among many items we see see-saw and pens!
One example is brewing of tea🍵
Dipping the tea into water, the tea solute will leach out ad get carried away from the tea bag. The hot water acting as the solvent dissolves the tea and this process can be sped up through agitation or time duration.
In engineering, mechanism is something that helps transform the forces, energy and movement into a desired set of forces output.
There are 6 essential mechanism in functional prototype:
- Actuators
- Cams
- Gears
- Levers
- Ratchets
- Springs
2. Cams convert a simple rotation of a shaft ( a shape with irregular shape) into a complex reciprocating linear motion. This can be see from many reciprocating pumps in pilot plants.
3. Gears transmit a torque and adjust rotational velocity. This can be related to an everyday item a bicycle gear working with the chain.
4. Levers transmit and amplify force by fixing the input and output about a pivot point.
This is related to physics and relates to the principle of moment. A common example is the wheel-barrow.
5. Ratchets lock allowing them to tighten and maintain constant high stress with ease. An example is cable tie, no matter how hard you try to undo a cable tie it will always be stuck in place.
6. Springs are the most common, they store and dissipate energy by compression and extension. You can see this in pens and mechanical pencils.
With that. we are tasked to design a creative way to replicate a ping pong ball launcher as seen below.
Ping pong ball launcher🔫
We have a very unique design that looks like a real life bolt action rifle intergrated into a toy nerf gun.
Propulsion principle
On the top right hand corner of the picture above you can see the bolt of the ping pong ball launcher also known as "pp rifle". Sounds cute right it stands for ping pong rifle... Anyways we use a spring mechanism to load these ping pong. By pulling up the bolt like the actual bolt rifles it actually acts as a safety. After pulling this bolt up, then you can pull back the bolt 'charging up' the elastic potential energy by compressing the spring inside. With this stored energy, we are able to propel the ping pong ball with the help of the spring mechanism.
Ball loading
The ball loading is also very realistic. We utilized the spring mechanism once again to load up the balls one by one into a long tube. The spring will be weaker compared to the spring used to propel the ping pong ball forward. This long tube is called a magazine and is a separate part of this pp rifle. The spring in the magazine also compress and increases in elastic potential energy which will slowly push the ping pong ball upwards to feed the pp rifle.
Trigger
The trigger uses a lever mechanism to allow the ping pong ball to move forwards when pushed.
This video may help you understand the background of our ideas: Bolt-action rifle
Practical 4☺
This practical was exceptionally fun as we were tasked to make our own game design with the use of cardboards and cardboard joinery. We had to utilize a marble of 22mm in diameter to make a minimum of 30 seconds game.
We had an absolutely bonkers idea and everyone in our team loved it. Can you guess what game we are making?? It is the pin ball game!! a classic favourite game I'm sure everyone has tried before. hehe this is going to absolutely amazing as we all can foresee :)
We tried to recreate this machine over here which is also made of wood and most of the materials we are provided with in the practical hence we were very convinced that it will not be that tough.
Firstly the most important part is the flippers that is at the bottom of the game. It is also the only moving part in this game. This makes our design slightly more straight forwards. These two flippers are used to push the marble upwards. The games objective is to maintain the pinball in this case our marble ball on top of the flippers. Once the marble fall through the gap between the flippers the game will be over. The picture on the right clearly shows how this practical was meant to happen. The colorful obstacles are bouncy rubber bands held up by securing three sides of the rubber band. There is also a ramp to increase the time duration as the marble will take long to drop down. The sides are curved so that marbles can move smoothly around this game.
Flippers😠
The flippers are the only moving part of the game hence I believe it deserves a spot light!🏅
This spring like mechanism is held in place with the help of an elastic rubber band. It goes back to its original position as the elastic rubber band do not deform easily and maintain its elasticity even when stretched.
As you can see the push box at the right pushes the skewer which pushes the rectangular box. This box is directly connected to the flippers and hence that how we can push the marble upwards.
After making our flipper we realized that our card board was poorly cut out and we did not have a hard wooden surface as seen in the above picture. This lead to the card board being dented when used constantly which makes this mechanism unusable >:( This was very upsetting as this small little thing took the most time 😭.
Another reason was that despite being a small marble, the marble was too heavy ⚓ and high in density compared to the light weighted cardboard, which made it very hard to push the marble back up despite having a very mild gradient in the pin ball machine we designed.
My team felt defeated because time was almost up and our final design did not succeed. However we persevered and came up with another bright idea.
In the end we switched the levers up with a piston which can be controlled manually. As it is still a game we have met all the criteria!!😎
our final product design
This is a short video of how we maintained constant motion of the marble while having fun!
We made it work and this game can be enjoyed at our very own W319, all are very welcomed to try!
Mechanism
This video is an in-depth explanation of the tutorial on how to play this game and the list of mechanism that are used in this design.
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Learning points💭💭
From this practical I really got to utilize the concepts I learnt from the previous week including the operating principles and the mechanism. The cardboard joinery also came in very handy in creating obstacles in my teams design.
I found out that recreating a simple game we have been playing since young was not an easy task and despite the preparations we had beforehand, we were still not competent enough to complete a good game design. I strongly believe that should all the team members be on the same page we would have gotten a better result. In addition we are not experts at cardboard hence our cutting skills needs to be improved much more to provide and strong and sturdy cardboard game. These two factors made our attempt fail.
However, despite the failure I am extremely thankful for my team for staying until the end to wreck our brains to figure out a salvageable solution to our game design. Even with so much effort inked into this game we still did not give up easily hence I think my group is very commendable so yes! Once again thank you💜 Joel, Jianye, Jian Lun and Brice for not giving up.
sI am absolutely surprise how we still manage to capture some pictures of us doing work
Great memories are meant to be shared so here are some little pictures of us diligently doing our task:
This is a very hardworking Joel figuring out how to properly glue skewer to our moving mechanism!
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