“Winners shall not be chosen. Only losers shall be eliminated. These are the laws of the Champions League.”
This week, we did more Pugh screening than I ever want to do again in my life. But before all of that, our team defined *most* of our design criteria last Friday, and expertly skimmed through the research of the previous team that worked on this project. At the start of this week, we began our Deep Dive into the information surrounding our problem, and the problem itself. We spent all of Monday and Tuesday doing research, and wrapped up the last of our deep research at the beginning of Wednesday.
Some good ol’ Pugh Screening
For the rest of Wednesday, we brainstormed component ideas for our solution, after decomposing our project into discrete blocks. After brainstorming over 165 ideas (wow!), we screened them down to smaller groups in their respective design blocks. A note about the screening, is that it took…a while. We had a large number of ideas in each category, so we ran a substantial number of matrices to get the number down to a manageable size. Afterwards we created a morph chart (combining the components into various complete solutions). After we finally finished making complete solutions, we ended up with 48 complete ideas that we then had to screen AGAIN. This took 5 matrices (we had to redo one because our standard needed to change) and we still have 13 solutions we need to screen down to at least 9. This is where the Champions League begins.
The Champions League is the final Pugh scoring matrix that we need to move forward into an arguably more tedious process, Pugh Scoring. We actually got about halfway through the matrix and realized we chose a poor standard so we restarted it, but alas, we paused to begin writing our blogs, which you are reading right now!
All in all, this week was the grind-iest part of the Engineering Design Process.
NON-SEED STUFF
This week we had a Solidworks and 3D printing workshop, led by Jeremy. Thus, there was quite the influx of 3D prints happening on the poor 4 printers that are available for our use. I designed and printed replicas of the shaft of the motor I’m using on my electric bike. I also designed and printed a stand or my bike. I tested this part today (it was an overnight print), and tragically, it failed. I will be redesigning this part later, and hopefully it’ll address the issues of what’s wrong with the current design.