Movies
ASME
Mine Madness 2004
As
a continuation of Machine Design and Synthesis (ENGR 320)
2003, St. Thomas mechanical engineering students Mark Onwuji,
Rob Roberts, and Stefan Yanovsky designed and built a vehicle to
compete in the ASME Student Design Contest within our region
hosted by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln in March 2004.
The basic idea is to use the vehicle to pick up “mines” from a
minefield and return as many of them as possible to a collection
area in a fixed period of time. Traversing over obstacles (such
as 4x4’s and 4x8’s) makes collecting some of the mines
challenging. Performance of the St. Thomas machine was in the
average range.
http://ust-pcstream1.stthomas.edu/engineering/ASME2004.wmv
ASME Bulk Material
Transporter 2005
As a continuation
of Machine Design and Synthesis (ENGR 320) 2004 and an ASME
Club activity, St. Thomas mechanical engineering students Rob
Roberts, William Stipe, and James Zoss designed and built a vehicle
to compete in the ASME Student Design Contest within our region
hosted by the University of North Dakota in March 2005. The basic
idea is to transport as much of the bulk material (rice in this
case) as possible from the floor, up the steps and into a bin in a
fixed period of time. Two of the entrants are shown, the winner
with a very efficient machine, “Rice Rocket” from SIUE (Southern
Illinois University at Edwardsville) and St. Thomas’ machine which
performed in the average range.
http://ust-pcstream1.stthomas.edu/engineering/ASME2005.wmv
ASME “Sip-n-Puff”
Controlled Fishing Rod 2006
As a continuation
of Machine Design and Synthesis (ENGR 320) 2005, and an ASME
Club activity and Individual Study, St. Thomas mechanical
engineering students Joe Crimando, Andrew DePompolo, Robert Ertel,
and Andre Trawick designed and built a machine to compete in the
ASME Student Design Contest within our region hosted by the
University of Missouri, Rolla in March 2006. The basic idea is to
create a machine that could (with proper interfacing) be used by a
handicapped person to fish. Fishing entails casting accurately to
different targets and retrieving the lure attached to a weight
representative of a fish. The St. Thomas machine had some problems
with tangled line (due to the required storage process) but still
managed to perform in the average range.
http://ust-pcstream1.stthomas.edu/engineering/ASME2006.wmv
Machine Design and
Synthesis (ENGR 320) 2004
Student teams designed, built, and tested a machine
to climb stairs. The internal St. Thomas contest was a proper
subset of the ASME Bulk Material Transporter 2005 Student Design
Contest. Two teams and their machines are featured, out of 7
(total). One of the machines is based on legged locomotion and
wheels and the other is based on use of tracks. Which one will make
it up and down the stairs (2 steps) without losing control? Watch
and find out!
http://ust-pcstream1.stthomas.edu/engineering/ENGR3202004.wmv
Machine Design and
Synthesis (ENGR 320) 2005
Student teams designed, built, and tested a machine
to cast a fishing lure. The internal St. Thomas contest was a
proper subset of the ASME “Sip-n-Puff” Controlled Fishing Rod 2006
Student Design Contest and involved casting, but no retrieval. The
goal is for the machine to cast a fishing lure to within the
designated target area. One team is featured in the video and their
first 2 attempts were unsuccessful. Will the team be successful on
the last attempt? Watch and find out!
http://ust-pcstream1.stthomas.edu/engineering/ENGR3202005.wmv
Machine
Design and Synthesis (ENGR 320) 2006
Student teams designed, built, and tested a trebuchet for use at The
Works. The Works is a children’s technology museum located in Edina,
MN and directed by Rebecca Schatz. A trebuchet is a medieval siege
weapon that was used to hurl objects (such as large stones and
animals) at castles. Structural damage, direct hits, or subsequent
disease and infection from rotting dead animals could impart
significant damage on the castle dwellers! Approximately 30 detailed
requirements were specified for the design; they pertain to such
issues as the range of motion of the projectile, different modes of
operation, portability, and ease of use. Students used the CAD
software SolidWorks to characterize the geometry of the design and
MATLAB to solve the nonlinear differential equations of motion for
all 3 phases of a successful hurl (slide, free hurl, and
unconstrained projectile motion). The MATLAB simulations enabled
students to establish good estimates for the various design
parameters such as lever arm lengths and the size of the
counterweight. A midterm design review provided a mechanism for
feedback from the community partner (The Works) as well as from
other faculty, who offered technical advice. The video snippet
features a series of short segments on 3 of the machines (out of 6
total) during “contest day,” in December of 2006. Our class was
fortunate to have several small children interact with the machines;
after all, they are the ultimate customers of the machine. Since the
video was made, several of the better machines have made it out onto
the exhibit floor on occasion at The Works. Lastly, there were 2 lab
sections, with one of them being taught by Dr. Michael Johnson of
3M.
http://stream.stthomas.edu/view.htm?id=ENGR3202006
Minimum-Time Skiing
Project in Kinematics and Mechanism Design (ENGR 225) J-term 2005
How does
one ski down the hill in minimum time? This is an interesting
mechanics and control problem that was studied theoretically,
through simulation, and experimentally. Ignoring the friction, the
solution is to initially head straight down the hill (from a dead
stop) and yaw at a constant rate such that one runs through the
finish. The straight line path is not time-optimal. The video
features 2 skiers close to the base of the Bakkelyka run at Welch
Village near Red Wing, MN. One skier traverses along a straight
line and the other skier traverses along a curved path downhill from
the straight line path. Which one is faster? Secondarily, how well
do the skiers adhere to the 2 solutions alluded to?
http://ust-pcstream1.stthomas.edu/engineering/MinimumTimeSkiing.wmv
Minimum-Time
Sailing Summer 2004 and in Kinematics and Mechanism Design (ENGR
225) J-term 2004
How does one sail from point A to point B in minimum
time? This is an interesting mechanics and control problem that was
studied theoretically, through simulation, and experimentally (for
the simple case of constant winds). Mathematically, it is
classified as a type of Zermelo problem based on the calculus of
variations. This video documents the yacht that was used (C & C 38)
and gives one a sense of what it was like to conduct experiments on
the yacht in the Apostle Islands by Bayfield, WI. After determining
the “boat polar” using Raymarine instrumentation for wind and boat
speed and a GPS unit, two optimal/competing suboptimal route cases
were successfully studied experimentally, one very close to the
close-hauled point-of-sail (i.e. “pinching”) and the other close to
a run point-of-sail, where the effect of the “dip” in the boat polar
was observed. Several hours after this video was taken, a storm
came through with high winds and the crew had to “bare-pole” it back
to Bayfield! Five members of the School of Engineering and a St.
Thomas student (Colin Sullivan) participated in this project.
http://ust-pcstream1.stthomas.edu/engineering/OptimalRouting.wmv
Dynamic 3D Visualization of Stress Tensors 2004
This video demonstrates how the state-of-stress at a
point can be transformed arbitrarily in 3D by changing the
orientation of the differential cube as a function of time. It is
all about a change of tensor bases. SolidWorks was used for
creating animations driven by MATLAB data generated from an
arbitrary time-varying Euler rotation matrix and a fixed
state-of-stress provided. In that sense, it is a generalization of
Mohr’s circle and if you were wondering about the magnitude of the
shearing stress on a given face, it is such that the corresponding
 point
is within the “tri-circular” region in general.
http://ust-pcstream1.stthomas.edu/engineering/StressTensor.wmv
Updated February 16, 2007 |