Week 7: Team Update

Heading into week 8, the team has several tasks that we will need to complete to stay on track. After speaking with Professor Brei, the team gained some pointers on how to start modeling our system. She suggested that we first go online and find companies that make motor/generator systems. This will give us a good sense of what's available and what companies make them. We will need some reliable suppliers with good spec sheets, also making sure that the components these companies make are small enough for our application.

In the meantime, we have begun to draw the system out in detail and come up with a gear-train design that will actually work. It was recommended that we find a motor first and then figure out what kind of transmission we need based on the gear ratio. The input power must be estimated to then find a motor that can accommodate it within a factor of safety. Once we've chosen a motor, we can use motor calculations and data from the spec sheets to figure out the optimal motor torque and speed and the gear ratio. This process will involve a lot of tweaking though, and we will probably have to it more than once.

It was implied that eventually we would model the entire system and solve it as a whole to find optimum values. How we plan on doing that is somewhat ambiguous, but the lectures helped the team at least gain insight as to how optimization can be used as a helpful design tool when dealing with problems that are unclear where to start from (like our gear-train/motor problem).

The modeling process is going to involve a lot of repetitive and confusing math, but where to start is outlined above. We have divided into sub-teams so that two group members can just focus on modeling, and the others can worry about the administrative/gate review 3 tasks. We are looking at a very busy week next week.