Week of March 11
Progress has been slow with the project lately, but that is mainly because we want to work on having the most comfortable design we could come up with. Luckily for us, we knew who to contact: a practising mechanical engineer. We showed her our design and received generous amounts of feedback.
As someone who worked in industry, she knows generally what constitutes a good design worthy of accomplishing structural and mechanical tasks. Additionally, she knows material properties that are commonly used, as well as why particular materials are not.
From our previous design (Week of February 22), we had come up with a band that runs medially from the ventral to the distal sides of the head. Although we knew the design was crude, we did not know that the structural integrity would be compromised had we not spoken with our consultant.
Bird’s eye view of the medial band with the red dashed lines representing the curvical change we expect to see to preserve the structural integrity.
Another big mistake we were told about was the use of our material, ABS. As a common 3D printing material, we believed it would suffice as the main component for our helmet. Yet, none of us had actually felt the material knowing it was ABS. As such, it came as a surprise when the engineer informed us of the intense rigidity and its ability to not compromise with flexibility.
We plan on working more with the consultant to help design and engineer a product worthy on Design Day.