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Automobiles can advance greatly with the introduction of metal additive manufactured components. Additive tooling is slowly becoming additive manufacturing and someday the technology will be advanced enough that high volume can be supported. This research was conducted in order to show the advantages metal additive manufacturing has in the automobile

Automobiles can advance greatly with the introduction of metal additive manufactured components. Additive tooling is slowly becoming additive manufacturing and someday the technology will be advanced enough that high volume can be supported. This research was conducted in order to show the advantages metal additive manufacturing has in the automobile industry. One large advantage to metal additive manufacturing is mass reduction. Components can be designed for production with different geometries than other manufacturing methods. The change in geometry can significantly reduce the product volume and therefore mass. Overall, mass reduction in the automotive industry is beneficial. Mass reduction can increase performance and fuel economy of the car. Once metal additive manufacturing becomes capable of higher production, metal additive manufacturing will play a major role in automobile manufacturing. Research was conducted to design and produce an optimized AC compressor bracket. The bracket was designed to the specifications of the OEM component, and the mass was reduced by more than half.
ContributorsSawyer, Brenton James (Author) / Hsu, Keng (Thesis director) / Parsey, John (Committee member) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
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Description
Many industries require workers in warehouse and stockroom environments to perform frequent lifting tasks. Over time these repeated tasks can lead to excess strain on the worker's body and reduced productivity. This project seeks to develop an exoskeletal wrist fixture to be used in conjunction with a powered exoskeleton arm

Many industries require workers in warehouse and stockroom environments to perform frequent lifting tasks. Over time these repeated tasks can lead to excess strain on the worker's body and reduced productivity. This project seeks to develop an exoskeletal wrist fixture to be used in conjunction with a powered exoskeleton arm to aid workers performing box lifting types of tasks. Existing products aimed at improving worker comfort and productivity typically employ either fully powered exoskeleton suits or utilize minimally powered spring arms and/or fixtures. These designs either reduce stress to the user's body through powered arms and grippers operated via handheld controls which have limited functionality, or they use a more minimal setup that reduces some load, but exposes the user's hands and wrists to injury by directing support to the forearm. The design proposed here seeks to strike a balance between size, weight, and power requirements and also proposes a novel wrist exoskeleton design which minimizes stress on the user's wrists by directly interfacing with the object to be picked up. The design of the wrist exoskeleton was approached through initially selecting degrees of freedom and a ROM (range of motion) to accommodate. Feel and functionality were improved through an iterative prototyping process which yielded two primary designs. A novel "clip-in" method was proposed to allow the user to easily attach and detach from the exoskeleton. Designs utilized a contact surface intended to be used with dry fibrillary adhesives to maximize exoskeleton grip. Two final designs, which used two pivots in opposite kinematic order, were constructed and tested to determine the best kinematic layout. The best design had two prototypes created to be worn with passive test arms that attached to the user though a specially designed belt.
ContributorsGreason, Kenneth Berend (Author) / Sugar, Thomas (Thesis director) / Holgate, Matthew (Committee member) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
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Description
This research work demonstrates the process feasibility of Ultrasonic Filament Modeling process as a metal additive manufacturing process. Additive manufacturing (or 3d printing) is the method to manufacture 3d objects layer by layer. Current direct or indirect metal additive manufacturing processes either require a high power heat source like a

This research work demonstrates the process feasibility of Ultrasonic Filament Modeling process as a metal additive manufacturing process. Additive manufacturing (or 3d printing) is the method to manufacture 3d objects layer by layer. Current direct or indirect metal additive manufacturing processes either require a high power heat source like a laser or an electron beam, or require some kind of a post processing operation to produce net-shape fully-dense 3D components. The novel process of Ultrasonic Filament Modeling uses ultrasonic energy to achieve voxel deformation and inter-layer and intra-layer mass transport between voxels causing metallurgical bonding between the voxels. This enables the process to build net-shape 3D components at room temperature and ambient conditions. Two parallel mechanisms, ultrasonic softening and enhanced mass transport due to ultrasonic irradiation enable the voxel shaping and bonding respectively. This work investigates ultrasonic softening and the mass transport across voxels. Microstructural changes in aluminium during the voxel shaping have also been investigated. The temperature evolution during the process has been analyzed and presented in this work.
ContributorsDeshpande, Anagh (Author) / Hsu, Keng H (Thesis advisor) / Parsey, John (Committee member) / Jiang, Hanqing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016