Solar Boat Challenge Project

thingiverse

Group Project files where we designed and raced a solar powered 3D printed boat with a reverse/return feature. My group worked really well in the designing, construction and racing of our solar boat. Having worked with the same members before, we all had a good idea of our strengths and weaknesses. This project has shown me that design can be a very complicated process. The theory of our project was conceptually simple; but once our group completed our literature review, it was clear that there was a plethora of options to weigh up and choose from with such an unconstrained problem. Previous projects had well defined limits with respect to the types of materials you could use, size and production times. Early on, our group realised that although the project was going to be judged as a race, the most important part of the design was to have a reliable direction changing mechanism. Ergo, there was absolutely no point in being the fastest if you can’t reach the finish line. I also worked in the concept of easy assembly into the design. With the previous gearbox project, having an assembly with components that came together easily and that could be serviced or repaired quickly proved to be an advantage. Having this element in the design would help later in the construction and performance area. From this we developed an Objective Tree and employed the Weighted Objective method of evaluation, similar to that as seen in Cross, N. (2008). Engineering Design Methods, Strategies for Product Design. This process allowed us to cut down the options we discovered though our research quickly and move into the refinement and prototyping stage of our project ahead of the majority of other groups. This reorganisation of design goals allowed us to beat the other teams we raced against on the evaluation day simply by having the most reliable system in our grouping. In developing and prototyping of our mechanism, we realised that the issue was not how to increase the velocity of the boat to meet the force requirement of the trigger, but to reduce the force required by modifying the mechanism to suit a worst case scenario speed. Once the final concepts of the design were chosen, I was able to combine my skills in computer aided design and my attachment to 3D printing to produce several iterations of our groups’ boat for prototyping. 3D printing gave the most flexibility to our concepts, and allowed for rapid development of our ideas. This attachment allowed us to make up for time lost during our research phase and helped us to improve our design overall.