Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (page 18). / Autosprout is the mass manufacturing equipment envisioned to produce Sprout, a pencil with a seed. This pencil concept was developed by MIT students a successful round of funding and first production run through Kickstarter. The goals for Autosprout are to fully automate the manufacturing process, and to reduce the manufacturing costs from eighty cents per pencil to less than thirty, while also producing a completely assembled pencil every five seconds. The original assembly process was slow and required a lot of manpower. However, it laid a foundation to design the automated process described in this thesis. The new system will feature two carousel systems. The first carousel will load the cedar pencil, cut a shoulder using a specially designed router, and finally add a dab of glue around the shoulder. The second carousel will load a pill capsule body and fill it with soil and two to three seeds. At the end of each carousel process the pill capsule and pencil will come together and the capsule will be placed onto the shoulder and the glue will hold it in place. Before the capsule is loaded into the carousel, it must be sorted and properly aligned. Models for a vibratory feeder were first designed and tested, but, due to the inconsistent performance of the models, an industrial vibratory feeder was purchased and modified. The modification consists of a chute leading to a vacuum system that removes the capsule from the feeder, rotates, and finally loads the capsule into the carousel by switching a valve making the vacuum into a stream of high air pressure. A similar system will be used for removing seeds from a hopper and placing them in the capsule. / by Eric A. Del Castillo. / S.B.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 63). / by Mitsuichi Hiratsuka. / S.M.

Thesis (Sc. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1989. / GRSN 409916 / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 265-271). / by Leonid Charny. / Sc.D.

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. / The ambition of this thesis was to design and prototype a seat-belt presenter of a four-point seat-belt system for the Lear Corporation. The seat-belt presenter designed is to be implemented in automobile seats in order to facilitate putting a four-point seat belt. The worked perform is the culmination of both Petr Petri and myself in our efforts to find a method to properly present a four-point seat-belt system. The design utilizes a magnet at the end of an aluminum arm that is pivoted below a person's knee on the seat. A sensor detects when a person sits down and begins a series of actions to present the seat belt. The device uses a set of four mechanical sensors to locate the position of the arm, the seat belt, and on the seat to detect when a person sits down. A control system, which utilizes logic components, then decides what direction to turn the arm in and when to stop it. The prototype that was built to simulate the seat-belt presenter appears to work well but has little details that need to worked up before a product like this enters the market. Among the most important issues to be resolved is the prototyping of the second arm on the presenter, the mounting of the motor and sensors onto the mount, use of the appropriate sensors, and to address the problem of the electrical components overheating. / by Miguel Angel Chavez. / S.B.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1995. / by Jun Beom Kim. / M.S.

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 17-18). / The Endoblend device concept was developed by a 2.75 design team,of which I was a member; the purpose of the device is to remove tissue laparoscopically. The detailed design of one of its modules, the enclosure module, is the subject of this paper. The Endoblend has the potential to reduce morcellation surgery time from upwards of half an hour to minutes, with reduced risk of the most common complications of nicking the abdomen wall and leaving tissue behind. There are three primary functional requirements of the enclosure module. First, for ease of use, simplicity, and safety the bag and guard in combination must passively feed the tissue into the blades. This was accomplished using, a cone shape to make the bottom of the bag act as an equilibrium state through a gravity feed. Second, the bag must remain intact to prevent tissue from being left behind. To accomplish this it will be shaped with a flat region near the blades so that inflating the bag keeps it away from the blades, and the Ziploc type seal through which the tissue enters will be a double seal with micro beads of cyanocrolate to make a strong permanent seal. / (cont.) Third, since the main benefit of the Endoblend is shorter surgery time, it is vital that the extra steps incurred from use of the enclosure module do not take up a significant portion of the time saved by its rapid tissue processing capabilities. The prototype bag met these functional requirements, and was used to successfully process tissue in a bench-top experiment. The successful design and integration of the enclosure module will allow this project to continue moving forward. This thesis along with the thesis on the guard answered the remaining critical questions that preceded putting together a next iteration prototype to use in order to perform animal tests. / by Daniel Hernandez-Stewart. / S.B.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 169). / by Narintr Narisaranukul. / M.S.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering. Thesis. 1974. M.S. / MICROFICHE COPY ALSO AVAILABLE IN BARKER ENGINEERING LIBRARY. / Includes bibliographical references. / M.S.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 76-82). / The theoretical calculations for near-field radiation heat transfer based on a local dielectric constant approach indicate that the heat transfer will go to infinity as the gap becomes very small. To correct this anomaly, it has been proposed that the heat transfer through very small gaps will saturate due to the influence of nonlocal effects on the dielectric constant. Previous experiments using an AFM bi-layer cantilever reported near-field radiation heat transfer between a silica sphere and a flat plate down to a 30 nm gap. The objective of this thesis is to experimentally study thermal radiative transfer at very small separation distances. Experimental results on near-field radiation heat transfer between a silica sphere and a flat glass substrate are presented for sphere-plate separation down to a few nanometers. The experimental results deviate substantially from the theoretical predictions for separation distance of 100 nm and start to saturate at a separation distance of 30 nm. In addition to the effect of the spatial dispersion of the dielectric constant, this saturation may be influenced by the surface roughness of the microsphere and/or repulsive electrostatic forces. Surface roughness is included in the analytical analysis of the radiative heat transfer through an approximate model based on the Proximity Force Approximation. / by Poetro Lebdo Sambegoro. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-183). / Ship design is a large-scale, multi-level, complex problem that requires decision-making at every stage of the design process. As such, it requires a great deal of time and resources. The evolution of the process of ship design has been relatively slow and is still based to a large extent on traditional methods that have been used for many decades. Evans' design spiral, which dates back to 1959, is the most characteristic example. These methods are reflected on the structure of various modem ship design software. However, these methods include inherent inefficiencies that need to be addressed. Some of them are the increased number of iterations, as well as the speed of execution of every iteration. The methods proposed in this dissertation try to alleviate such inefficiencies by introducing novel and easy-to-use approaches, including the formulation of new algorithms. Furthermore, concrete models are introduced in cases where there is no systematic approach to a problem. These approaches include both optimization and heuristic techniques. Neural networks belong to the first category, and although they have been used for small-scale marine problems, they haven't been extensively tested in a more general framework. Heuristics include methods such as the Mapping Model and the QuickEst algorithm, which are not found in marine applications. Heuristic methods are divided into quantitative and qualitative techniques. This research focuses on Air Cushion Vehicles since they are the newest type of advanced marine vehicles and their study is considered both tedious and challenging. However, the research also expands to other types of marine vehicles. Both design and operational aspects are examined as case studies. The results from these methods are cross-validated with other well-established and widely-used methods such as Multiple Linear Regression, proving the usefulness and validity of the considered methods. / by Georgios Gougoulidis. / Ph.D.