24 Hours of Lemons

In the Fall of 2016, six friends late at night in a dorm room decided to enter a 24 Hours of Lemons race. We hopped on craigslist and found someone in New Hampshire selling his old Mercedes Benz 300E for $250. 24 Hours later, we were the proud owners of a rather non-functional car with very little idea what we had gotten ourselves in to.

But before we continue, a little context. The 24 Hours of Lemons is an endurance racing series that takes place across the US where teams buy and repair cars for no more than $500 (this doesn’t account for the cost of safety equipment). The races are typically not 24 hours long, ours was 14.5 hours over two days, though that’s still asking for a lot from cars that are barely clinging on to life. For more context on the race series as a whole, here’s a link to their site.

Olga, as she became affectionately known was not in good shape when we bought her. She didn’t run, her engine smelled like it was flooded with gas, and her interior was more cigarette-butt than leather.

However, over the course of the next 12 months, we would travel to New Hampshire (our friend’s family had a shop they so graciously let us use) almost every weekend to work on the car, and slowly it all came together. Just getting the car running took 8 weeks, and in that time we :

• Replaced Head Gasket

• Leveled Head

• Cleaned valves

• Replaced and spaced all spark plugs

• Replaced distributor, distributor cap, and wiring loom

• Replaced all corroded hydraulic and fuel lines

• Drained and replaced all fluids

• Diagnosed lack of spark as malfunctioning firing computer

• Replaced firing computer

• Replaced exhaust and intake manifold gaskets

Once those eight weeks were done, we had a running, driving car. Now we began the performance and safety modifications. This meant removing the entire interior, patching any holes in the frame, designing, fabricating, and installing a roll cage, installing an electronic cut-off, and installing a race seat with 5 point harness.

With all our safety equipment installed, and the car as ready for racing as it would ever be, we drove up to New Hampshire for the first actual track racing any of us had ever participated in. In our 14.5 hours of the track, the car ran flawlessly, and apart from a few cosmetic bruises here and there from some other over-zealous racers, came out unscathed.

After a year of work we all managed to get out on to the track. Were we fast? not at all, our car had maybe 180 horsepower new, and with our jumble of vacuum tubes that were just left unplugged we were maybe making 120, but we were consistent. We managed to run flawlessly for the entire race, and the organizers appreciated that grit so much that we were awarded the highest award of the race, the coveted “Index of Effluency”.

And finally, our trophy, the coveted “Index of Effluency”. You may be thinking, “So if they themselves admit that they were slow, how did they come away with the most coveted award of the race and the largest cash prize?” Well, the IOE trophy isn’t for coming first in the race, in fact, coming first is pretty heavily discouraged as it shows you either didn’t have enough fun, or cheated and went above your $500 cap, hence why winning coming first nets only $400 (compared to $601 for the IOE). The IOE then, is awarded to the car that had the best ratio of “least likely to be a good race car” to “was actually a good race car”. By showing up in a boat of a German luxury sedan with notoriously unreliable electronics and a 4 speed automatic transmission, yet running faultlessly for the entire race, we handily met those requirements.

Over the course of a year, everyone on our team went from minimal knowledge of how a car works to pretty seasoned veterans of car maintenance. The breadth of issues we had to deal with to get Olga into racing shape was enormous, from simple brake replacement to diagnosing faulty electrical systems. Not only was this project massively enjoyable, but quite possibly one of the best learning experiences of my Olin career.

Olin Aero/Design Build Fly

I joined a newly re-formed AERO in the Spring of 2016. For the first year, AERO was building quadcopters with the intention of developing some fundamental understanding of unmanned aerial systems.

In the Fall of 2016, I was given control of AERO and set out to expand the role of AERO at Olin. I felt that there was an insufficient number of aerospace pursuits at Olin, and set out to enable students to pursue aerospace projects by providing financial and administrative support through AERO. AERO would take funding from donors and sponsors, and provide funds to student teams. By the Fall of 2017, AERO had expanded to the parent organisation of three separate project teams, each competing in their own unique competitions. These teams are:

The International Aerial Robotics Competition: Building fully autonomous aerial vehicles designed to fulfill novel, interesting challenges as defined by the rules of the Internation Aerial Robotics Competition (rules here).

Design Build Fly: Designing and Building highly specialized fixed-wing remote control aircraft to fulfill a variety of missions (rules here). On top of being President of AERO, I was Propulsion Lead for Design Build Fly in the 2017-2018 year, and Financial Manager for 2017-2019.

Olin Rocketry: Designing and building custom rockets with the intention of competing in the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (rules here).

Design Build Fly

For the 2017-2018 season the competition was to design and fly aircraft that:

• Carries passengers and cargo

• Is easily field-serviceable with most major components (propeller, servos, motor, battery)being line-replaceable units (LRUs) that also fit in the cargo compartment.

• Minimizes wingspan and weight

• Uses no lithium based batteries

With these restrictions in mind, and after doing some scoring analysis, we decided that the benefits of minimizing wingspan and weight far outweighed the benefits of adding more passengers or cage, and designed a small aircraft that carried one passenger and one cargo block. The aircraft was to be made of a carbon-fiber fuselage with vinyl coated balsa-wood wings.

With an aircraft built we traveled to competition in Wichita, KS where we would be competing against 100 other teams in three flying missions and one ground mission. Our first flight ended in failure as our over sized ailerons flipped the plane while compensating for a gust of wind and the plane suffered a relatively major crash.

Fortunately we repaired all the damage to the aircraft in what remained of the first day, and went on to fly the remaining missions over the next two days, eventually placing 11th out of 101 teams in the overall standing at the end of the competition.

One of the key focuses of the Design Build Fly competition is effectively documenting the work performed by each team. Team’s are not only graded on their reports, but a preliminary report determines whether a team qualifies to compete, and the final report submitted before competition is a significant part of a team’s final score in the competition. The reports typically include details for every design process for the aircraft. This includes configuration selection (Tractor vs Pusher, monoplane vs biplane, traditional vs tandem vs canards) all the way through composite manufacturing techniques. A copy of our report for the 2017-2018 competition can be viewed here.

Design Build Fly’s first year was undoubtedly hectic, and a massive opportunity to learn and to grow for the small team that competed that year. For most of us, this was our first major aerospace project, and a genuine trial by fire in terms of learning all of the relevant skills to be competitive. The 2018-2019 competition in Flagstaff, AZ calls for a much larger aircraft, and we’re lucky enough to have a team three times the size of the team from last year. We hope to continue the momentum DBF has built, and to cultivate skills in our new members that lead to the continued success of them and DBF moving forwards.

Kinetic Sculptures.

Introduction to Mechanical Prototyping.

Introduction to Mechanical Prototyping serves as the first time many students are exposed to mechanical design. The class goes through the basics of structures, fasteners, and joints before throwing students into two projects where they design and build kinetic sculptures in teams of 4-5.

For our first sculptures, our teams were tasked with designing nautically themed sculptures that were powered using an electric motor. These sculptures were also required to include at least three methods of power transmission, and be made primarily of machined components. Our main structure was two clock-cage boxes where the motor and gearbox lay. Head and tail of the fish are bent, punched brass brazed together at the seams. The body achieves a waving motion using 5 plates, each attached to a rotating shaft using telescoping tubes with their anchor points offset by 15 degrees. The tail achieves a back and forth motion using a 4-bar linkage driven by an electric motor.

For our second sculptures, we were tasked with creating wind powered sculptures that represented a specific branch of Engineering. These sculptures were going to be primarily constructed using sheet metal, with limited 3D printing and machined parts. Our sculpture represents Electrical Engineering; The center piece of our design is a large water-jet sheet of aluminium with a faux PCB stenciled on. The center piece is bent at the edges and riveted together to ensure rigidity. The main housing is two large bent steel pieces bolted together. These pieces are primed and painted to ensure they did not corrode while placed outside. Sitting atop the sculpture is a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) that was optimized typical wind speeds in Needham, MA. This turbine connects to a thick wire with a representation of a battery and resistor attached to it through a reduction gearbox. This gearbox ensures that even in low wind speeds our items can spin while also preventing them from spinning too fast in high winds.

User Oriented Collaborative Design

Above is our final presentation poster for UOCD. On it, we present “Garbage Gary: Your Yersonal Garbage Guru”, our proposed solution to the many problems that are faced by people in the waste collection and management industry. Gary provides key information to garbage collectors letting them plan their routes to avoid houses that haven’t put out their trash on collection day, and lets recycling plants know if trash has been poorly sorted. Gary interacts with the consumer by providing information on how to best recycle items for their specific municipality, and reminds them to take out the trash. The solutions presented as part of UOCD are never fully realized products, though looks-like and interacts-like prototypes are often built, instead UOCD teaches students to best identify the needs of a specific user groups and to design a set of product functions that best meet those requirements.

In User Oriented Collaborative Design, we are tasked with directly working with a specific user group to design a product that would meet needs that were currently un-met. The general process for how this pans out looks something like this:

• Determine user group

• Identify potential users to co-design with

• Observe users performing their job, identify pain points both explicit and implicit

• Build personas based on user priorities

• Determine solutions to specific problems identified with each persona

• Talk to users again to ensure current state of design is good and they feel like identified problems and proposed solutions are good

• Design a specific product concept that would meet user needs while working in an appropriate context

Those are a lot of general points, but the real world application of the process is quite a lot more fluid and can be tailored to the user group you are working with. Our user group for this project was “Waste Disposal Managers”. With that in mind, our first step was to talk to people who we though were representative of the user group, so we scheduled visits to a dump/recycling plant, a thrift store, and a garbage collection company.

Once interviews were conducted, we would make notes of all our observations and interactions during the visits. The intention is to try and begin to determine user needs and map priorities of each user. User needs are determined both through direct questioning of issues, but also by observing day to day interaction and trying to find areas for improvement. From these observations we could construct personas that condensed the priorities and needs of our users into a few general ideas.

With our personas defined, and our user needs evaluated, we began the process of designing a product to meet those needs. This began by envisioning an ideal world for our users, and trying to find a way to get there within the context of the real world.

With a framework established, we began the ideation process and began to narrow down our ideas into a single product.

With the design work done, we settled on the idea of designing an integrated trash can to replace the bins mandated in our area. These trash cans could provide advice to consumers on what to recycle, and when to take out their trash for trash day, while letting garbage collectors know whether trash cans have been put out or not so that they can plan their routes based on which houses have put their trash cans out. The recycling advice also benefits the managers of waste management centers by reducing the amount of cross-contamination and the amount of sorting required of the trash and recycling they take in.

Quantum Locking

In Quantitative Engineering Design, our team investigated both the Meissner Effect, and Quantum Locking by chilling Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide (YCBO) superconductors either in a magnetic field, or outside a magnetic field and moving the superconductors in to the field.

The intention of the investigation was to try and develop a low-cost alternative to super-conducting demonstration sets already on the market as they were all priced in the neighborhood of $5000. We worked with a science educator to develop a portable kit that was safe enough to be used in a classroom of elementary school students. Our solution using materials purchased at retail prices cost around $300, however, performance was not as good as we were hoping. We believed that for $500 we could build a demonstration set that rivaled the quality of commercially available $5000 kits while providing the durability and safety required to operate in a classroom.

Asteroid Behavior in the Earth-Moon System

Modelling and Simulation of the Physical World (ModSim) is one of the first classes we take at Olin and is our introductory programming class. For our ModSim final project, my team wanted to determine the path of an asteroid in the Earth-Moon system assuming it was receiving a lunar gravity assist. Our calculations were performed in Matlab. Our simulation assumed that the only forces in the system were the gravitational attractions of the Earth, the Moon, and the Asteroid. Each simulation would solve for the path of the asteroid in the system using an ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver, and end conditions were either a time-out condition, which indicated the asteroid had entered a stable orbit, a maximum distance condition, where the asteroid left the Earth-Moon system, or minimum distance conditions where the asteroid impacted either the Earth or the Moon.

Our calculations accounted for 1000 different velocity values (0-2000 m/s in 2m/s increments) and 1000 different relative angles of motion (0-360 degrees in 1000 steps) to provide a 1000x1000 matrix of possible outcomes. The simulation was parallel-processed on a machine with 36 threads and error-correcting memory to ensure no floating point errors and to decrease compute time.