Week of 9/26/2018

The highlight of last week and this week was preparing for Presentation 1. I work on the guide arm of the bogie. Dan recommends in his final report from Spring 2018 that the guide arm should be spring loaded. The main benefits it to reduces wear on wheels of bogie and vibrations endured by the whole bogie. The main purpose of the guide arm is to guide the bogie around curved sections of the track. For the presentation, I presented two idea of how plan to make the wheels of the guide arm spring loaded. I have attached both the designs below. Also, the team is responsible  providing the Motor team with mounting points for the hub motor axles. I did some research on bicycle hub motors, and came across a peer-review articles that suggests a new method of mounting hub motors to the forks of the bicycle. The gist of the article is to use an elongated axles that threads into the sleave pressed in the motor; on the other side, a cap then tightens into the axle. A cut-out of the article is also provided below.

Week of 9/5/2018

Akash Sandhu -Member of Full-Scale Drivetrain

Week of 9/5/2018 

Lightning Presentation and Proposal

One of the main task that were completed this week was the "Lightning Presentation". For my part of the "Lightning Presentation". I had done my research of what torque vectoring, the benefits of torque vectoring, and methods of application. I learned that torque vectoring is vehicles purposely transfer different amounts of power to different axles of the vehicle or an individual wheel. Initial, torque vectoring was only done on 4 wheel drive vehicles where the drive train of the car would change the power distribution between the front and rear axles of the vehicle when sensing slippage. However, the technique of torque vectoring has improved over the years where vehicles are now able to control how much power an individual driving wheel receives. This has allowed both front and rear wheel drive vehicles to implement torque vectoring. It has be shown to be helpful in increasing performance of vehicles in cornering. Furthermore, it helps to deal with wheel slippage. However, after discuss this with Dr. Furman, it does not seem reasonable and cost efficient to implement this kind of system into the bogie. The next task of the week was completing the proposal of the full-scale drive-train team.  For the proposal, I worked on the project description, project objectives, the outline for scope. Furthermore, I contributed some to of the deliverables, such as the need for another motor if the High density motor does not work. I also contributed a little to the required facilities and funding, and the general formatting of the proposal.