Gravity Battery Update: 2/15/2017

This week all three gears were printed out at the correct thickness. One of the gears stopped printing towards the end because the filament on the 3D printer ran out, but for testing purposes that should be fine. Now that I have all three gears I can attach them to the rods I cut last week and put them on the t-slot stand. When it was convenient for him, I talked with Dr. Cummings and he showed Dr. Bellis and I how to hold the smaller t-slots still when drilling holes into them. Tomorrow I am going to drill the holes into the t-slots and attach the gears in a row. We realized that it is difficult to get the axles through the thicker gears, so it will take longer than we expected to hook them all together. We plan to test out if these gears will spin the bike dynamo when hooked together. A picture of the three gears with the axles partially in them is below.

Gravity Battery Update: 2/07/2017

This week I increased the thickness of three of the gear sets I will be using in the final gear train. I am currently waiting for them to be done printing out. Since these gear sets are much thicker than the test gears, they take a longer time to print out. I located a hacksaw so I could cut through the steel rods I am using for the axles. I cut through two of them, leaving me with four axles, so I can test the three gears we are printing out. I put one of the shorter axles on the apparatus and put a bolt on either side to hold the rod in place (pictures below). For the rest of this week I am going to talk with Dr. Cummings and figure out the best way to drill holes in the t-slots so we the axles will be even. Below I also included pictures of how the test gears mesh together on one side and don't run into each other on the other side.

Gravity Battery Update: 2/1/2017

I sent two of the updated gear files to Dr. Kolonko to have them printed and they came out looking good. They mesh together the way we wanted them to. Since these were just test gears I had them printed at a small thickness so we did not waste time and filament. This week I am going to edit the files again to make them the thickness we have decided on for the final gears we will print. I tested the steel rod again with 100 lbs and found that the rod still holds, but there is a slight bend in the middle due to the heavy weight. The solution to this could be to make the rod shorter so the rod has more support from the t-slots on the ends holding it up. I am currently in the process of figuring out the best way to cut through the steel bars. This week I am going to put two screws on either side of the ends of the rod to see if that helps keep the rod in place.

Pictures (sorry, Alyx):

Gravity Battery Update: 1/24/2017

I met with Dr. Bellis last week and we made a game plan for the semester. After discussing different aspects of the project with him I started working. Last week and in the beginning of this week I tested the strength of the steel rods I plan to use to hold the gears in my gear train. To do this, I put together the base of the t-slots that will be holding the gear train and I attached the rod between two t-slots that have holes drilled in them (done last semester) to keep the rod in place. I hung up to 50 lbs on the rod without any issues. I tested the rod because when the gear train is put together there is going to be a lot of force on the gears so I need to make sure the structure holding everything is stable. While it was important to test the rod's strength, I was also testing the holes we made in the t-slots last semester to see if they would hold the rod when weight was hung from them. Hanging weight straight down doesn't seem to be an issue, but I noticed part of the structure is able to move because it isn't supported on all sides. (See pictures attached).

Another thing I did was recreate gears in SolidWorks so I could 3D print them to test whether or not the gears will mesh when hooked together the way we need them to be. I had some trouble because the program was not cooperating so it took me longer than normal, but I finished the test files and sent them to Dr. Kolonko who has kindly agreed to print some of my test files for me.

For the end of this week and next week I plan on testing the rod up to 100 lbs and seeing how that affects the structure. I will be thinking of a way we can fix the structural issues we have run into (and fixing them as soon as I can) as well as answering the challenge question(s) Dr. Bellis has asked me. Once the test gears are printed I will be testing those to see if they mesh the way we need them to.

Gravity Battery Summary

For my advanced lab project I am continuing my work on the gravity battery in order to work on re-designing a previously existing machine that uses gravitational potential energy to store energy. I will be abandoning the rack and pinion approach and working on modeling an Atwood machine. Over the summer, my research partner and I ran into unforeseen challenges that prevented our gravity battery from working. My goal this semester is to re-design aspects of our previous design and improve upon others. I plan to research potential problems and test out which solutions work best while putting the apparatus together.