High-Level Project Summary
The system consists of two springs, two temporary magnets using electromagnet principle and two cylinders. When two magnets have opposite polarity, the attraction force will lead to the compression of the spring. At the moment of separation, the current of one of the magnets will be reversed, the closer poles of the magnets will have similar polarities which will lead to a repulsion between the magnets and the spring will expand leading to a stronger repulsion force. By this method we will have efficient system that is compact in size and can be reactuated without replacing parts.
Link to Project "Demo"
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Detailed Project Description
The brainstorming sessions started by identifying the criteria required to successfully build a system that meets the requirements. After that, we started reading previous articles to see the available solutions and evaluate them. Later, we have generated the specifications and created different conceptual designs. We then have selected the best alternative (theoretically) which was similar to the current design but, instead of magnetic field we used a partition that separate the springs. When we designed it we were not able to design the partition without an actuator and the springs were always prevented from motion. So, we have changed the alternative to better selection.
The current selected design consist of two cylinders to mount the springs and compress them as much as possible. The two edges of the cylinder will have magnetic field produced by electricity which means the polarity can be controlled. When in attraction the cylinders will be compressed. In repulsion, the system will release the springs system producing high force in short time. This way will enable us to have efficient, reliable system, light since it doesn’t have motors and actuators and can be re-actuated infinitely as long as parts are not damaged.
To successfully design the selected alternative, CATIA V5 was used in order to create the 3D model and drawing and Zoom was used to meet and share our thoughts and ideas.
We are looking to work more on simulation and quantitative analysis from thermal fluctuation, stresses and kinematic analysis. We are confident that such a mechanism will change the way parts are separated in space with higher efficiency and less safety requirements
Space Agency Data
The first idea that cached our attention is the lightbands which has two rings attached by springs and when the motor start the inner ring contracts causing the clamps to release [1]. From this idea we understood how energy stored in elastic components can be converted to motion. However, we were thinking how to release our system to be more efficient than motors. Since motors are usually heavy and require high amount of energy as well as maintenance. After that, we read more about other ways to release the system like thermal contraction and expansion [2]. But, our main concern was that space environment has a lot of fluctuation in temperatures so, this may adversely affect our mechanism. Later, we came up eith the idea of the magnetic field which will have a high possibility of producing power along with the springs.
Hackathon Journey
48 hours full of joy and education, we developed our research skills and get to know more about space technologies. With brainstorming sessions and reading previous articles we were able to overcome most of the challenges and make this experience unique.
In the beginning, we reviewed Nasa Challenges selected the best one according to our passion and then relized that springs are a main source of power to give us the required force to separate the components. However, How to release the springs was a major challenge to work on and solve.
We have repeated the design process more than once to ensure that our system will successfully meet the requirement. Each time we repeat the process, the more we get excited to redistribute the tasks and see the results.
I would like to thank the team and the challenge’s organizer for giving us the opportunity to improves youths knowledge about space applications. This fruitful experience has enriched our knowledge and understanding !
References
[1] "Separation Device Launches New Science Payloads," NASA , 2020. [Online]. Available: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2020/ip_8.html.
[2] M. Badescu, X. Bao and Y. Bar-Cohen, "Shape memory alloy (SMA)-based launch lock," Jet Propulsion Lab, Caltech, Pasadena, CA .
Tags
#spring, #seperation, #power , #elasticity
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.