What I learned about design

Design is critical to every stage of your product. As we build these projects it seems that one of the things that gets neglected is to make changes to the design to accommodate for changes in the materials and amounts of materials. Changing the bill of materials needed to build the product can change design specifications in very critical ways. For example take my team's project The Urban Concept Car ( Super mileage vehicle run electrically). We made it through the first stage of qualifications at the Shell Eco Marathon in Houston, Texas but, we didn't make it through the second stage because our vehicle's top speed was 10 MPH below the specified qualification to be met in order to compete with the vehicle. Why was this? Our team did not make adjustments to our gross vehicle weight as we added weight and friction was forgotten about when it played a huge role. Both of these factors needed to be accounted for when we did our torque calculations and gear ratio calculations as they determine the speed of our vehicle. Had we accounted for the extra body weight and friction when we did these calculations we would have been able to reach top speed. Another issue was aspects of our vehicle needed to be analyzed using rotational dynamics  and they were not. This errors should have been caught during the design reviews. This highlights the importance of a solid design process and design review. These processes when used correctly are tools to fix the issues we had. We will implement these tools as we move into the future and new projects having learned from our mistakes


Below is a link that will take you to some modern engineering marvels. A chance to see what the skills of an engineer, the design process and the effort of several teams communicating well can achieve. The thing that I noticed and thought of most while looking through this site is the size of these projects. The first thing that came into my mind was how much more difficult design and project management must be due to the sheer size. As the size of the project increases so do the people involved in order to accomplish the task. As people are added more communication and better communication is needed for success.

                                                                                   Chad Wiebe

The mind of engineering does not close the doors to what it doesn't understand. Instead, we remain opened minded and learn to understand what once challenged us.


http://www.gizmowatch.com/entry/20-marvels-of-modern-engineering/