Blog 6

Heyyy guys 👋🏻, how are you guys doing? Im back with another blog! In this blog, I will be sharing with you what i have learn on the operating principle and mechanism design and also my practical 4 experience🥳.

Operating principle & mechanism

What is operating principle? Operating principle is technically how the device work and what principle is my chemical device based on. In order for the identified operating principle to work efficiently, mechanical movements are often required. Mechanism is something that transforms forces and movement into a desired set of output forces and movement.⚙️

Example of some mechanism includes:

• Actuators • Cams • Gears • Lever • Ratchets • Springs

In week 13, me and my team was tasked to design a ping pong ball launcher.🏓🔫🚀. The requirements for it was to show the mechanism that shoots the ping pong ball and how the ping pong ball reloaded after one is fired off.

Instead of designing the launcher together, me and my team added fun to it and decided to make it a little competition where we were given a few mins to sketch our own design and whoever drew the ugliest sketch had to do a dare given by the one who won🤣. Our sketches can be seen below:

Valarie's design:

My design:

Eshvin's design:

Asraf's design:

Can you guess who's the winner from these sketches? *DRUMROLL* , VALARIE!!!🤩🤩 . Althought me and valarie had the same idea , valarie did a better job at drawing it out hence she won while sadly i didn’t🥲. Unfortunately, eshvin got last place so she had to do a dare given by valarie😂😂

From the video below, you can see the mechanism of the gun me and valarie had in mind:

Propulsion principle

The toy uses rubber band as the energy storage mechanism to propel the ping pong ball. The user manually streched the rubber band by pulling the lever located at the end. A lever is used to hold the streched rubber band in placed. When the lever is released using the trigger, the rubber band will propel the ping pong ball.

Ball loading

When a ball is propel off, the next ball will roll down due to gravity into the launching area.

Thats all for the first part of my blog. In the next part, i will be sharing with you about practical 4.

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Practical 4

In practical 4, me and my team was tasked to design and build a cardboard structure that incorporates a manually operated mechanism to keep a marble in continuous motion for at least 30 seconds.

The requirements for this practical:

• The cardboard structure must incorporates one manually operated mechanism. • The structure must be able to keep a marble (average diameter: 22 mm) in continuous motion for at least 30 seconds • The structure should not be more than 100cm x 100cm x 100cm • Structure should be made predominantly of corrugated cardboard • No electronics is required • You are ALLOWED to meet to design and build the individual parts of the structure before the session and assemble them to form the finished structure during the practical session.

A week before practical 4, me and my team had a meet-up to plan for our design. During that meet-up, we researched for ideas and videos online for inspiration. We then came across a design that was not that complicated hence we decided to create something like it. The mechanism we chose to used is a double crank locomotive mechanism which has been primarily used as a coupling between two parallel non-inline shafts generating nonuniform motion of the driven shaft. This non-uniformity of the continuous output rotation makes the double-crank mechanism a versatile input source. A rough sketch of our design could be seen as shown below.

My team's finalised design:

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Mechanism (will be joined with a connecting rod behind the spiral base):

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Fabrication process:

Finish product:

Video of product in operation:

Yayy our ideas came to live! At first, we were all worried that our crank would not work due to us using a cardboard as the fixed link in between the cranks instead of a string. This is because we were only allowed to use cardboard materials. However, we tried making the crank during our planning stage and it worked hence we decided to go for it.

Isn't so cool to see marble staying in motion with just materials made out of cardboard😮🤯?? If you would like to play with my team's cardboard design on this marble run, you can visit the lab at W319 and if you like it, pls help us by voting for us😇🙌🏻. Thankyouu and stay tuned for my next blog😉🤘🏻