Design Review I

Our group's first design review was given today and as a fun test, we passed out muffins that were divided in half as muffin tops and muffin bottoms. Verifying the popularity of the muffin tops, it was to no one's surprised that the last remaining muffins were roughly 10-12 muffin bottoms.

After our presentation, concerns were raised in regards to our project:
Design_Review_1_Paper
Design_Review_1_Presentation

1.) Thermal Expansion of aluminum, which is the primary material for our overall structure. Raised by Professor Ateshian, we note that Al has a high thermal expansion coefficient. A different material could be looked into, such as ceramic. We originally choose aluminum due to its ease of manufacturing and the fact that it is a material we are used to working with. 

2.) The potential for a cookie sheet effect around the location of the dough's holding mechanism. Since we need a support, as small as it is, such an issue will be difficult to avoid but will be taken into account during the following redesigns for Design Review II. 

3.) A final note is made by Professor Myers in that our design can currently only make 1 muffin or baked good at a time. Such is the case, we will look into designing an additional structure to take this into account pending funds and time remaining after finishing the initially discusses goals.

The following video demonstrates the proposed motion of our device and was done through Creo:

We also performed calculations pertaining to our proposed model:

In the above figure, the colored cyclical random curves represent the x, y, and z measures while the lines of matching colors represent the averages of the Creo measures. The dashed black lines represent the position of the center of the concentric rings, the point at which we desired the averages to fall. Though this analysis was done for just 20 seconds, there is a very small deviation in the average position from the center position, verifying the design assumptions.

In addition to tracking the motion of the point, a connection reaction torque measurement was defined to determine the amount of torque required to produce 30 RPM. Such a result required near .5 Nm of torque, which will be taken into consideration for motor selection.

Thus, over the winter break period, we will look into 2 major areas of concern:
   i. Spring loaded motor versus any other type of external motor
   ii. Aluminum material versus ceramic or steel for the major of parts to be manufactured