[1]

Recycling Challenge

Revenge of the Recycling System!

In this scenario, the team was tasked with creating a system that would identify and transport certain containers to the appropriate bin to be recycled. On the modelling sub-team, our task was to create a mechanism that would be controlled by an actuator in order to dump the containers out of the transfer system.

Project Takeaways

Creating and constraining assemblies in Autodesk Inventor
Life-cycle analysis of materials
Creating detailed engineering drawings

Through this project, I was able to embrace the design process, as this project required a lot of reiteration of the design. This project allowed me to explore how everyday mechanisms worked and that helped my sub-team and I design ideas for our project. Through this project I was truly able to understand the importance of each milestone and recognize how much each step contributes to the final product.

From this project, I learned to be direct with my expectations for other team members as that was a huge roadblock throughout this project. As well, had the opportunity to reflect on various ethical aspects that would go into expanding this project and was able to recognize the impact that our decisions as engineers have on our communities. Overall, it was a very cool project that allowed me to apply knowledge from class as well as apply technical skills as well.

Design Process

motion required to dump contents

The goal of the modelling sub-team was to design a mechanism that would work with an actuator, linear or rotary, to translate the motion of the actuator into an angular motion for the hopper. The very first step was to come up with initial sketches for both actuator options. The main objective for this team was creativity and the only constraint was to keep the 3D printing time under a certain limit. With these things in mind, we really had to think about how we can keep the mechanism as simple as possible while still achieving that creativity aspect. The design that we were going to pursue was going to mimic a car jack mechanism and work with a rotary actuator. While this was a creative solution, it was definitely too complicated and required a lot of time to fabricate. After looking into similar mechanisms, we decided to pursue a mechanism that functions similar to a dump truck mechanism. Once initial sketches were complete, a CAD model was created in order to refine dimensions to match up properly with the rest of the system. With the final dimensions in place, we began the fabrication process. The final mechanism was very small but due to time constraints we were unable to go back and adjust the dimensions to properly function.

Final Assembled Prototype

Exploded Drawing of Assembly

picture credits

[1] J. Saldaña, “Phoenix will implement New Residential Recycling System,” BORDERNOW, 18-Apr-2022. [Online]. Available: https://border-now.com/phoenix-will-implement-new-residential-recycling-system/. [Accessed: 12-Apr-2023].