Modified design of a planter to be attached to a mobile robot, was the main objective of this project. This research project was part of a larger project, called “Developing robotics assisted technology for farming”. The main motivation for this research project is the fact that mobile robot, is an electric powered vehicle with limited power and pulling force. Thus, a customized planter with a customized connection mechanism should be designed. Besides, it should require less draft force compared to existing planters so that it can be pulled by the mobile robot. The developed planter should have the same efficiency as the existing planters in seeding. To find the forces between soil engagement tool (disc coulter) and soil, experiments were designed and performed in the Linear Soil Bin at University of Saskatchewan. Disc and tilt angle of a disc coulter was changed and draft, vertical and side forces applied to it were measured to find the disc and tilt angle combinations that results in minimum draft force. Experiments showed that 7° disc angle and 25° tilt angle provides the least draft force compared to other disc angle and tilt angle combinations. Then, using the knowledge obtained from literature and the soil bin experiments, a planter was designed conceptually and in detail, based on the existing CNH planter. For further analyses computer modeling was performed. The whole planter was modeled in 3D, using SolidWorks. Stress analysis was performed in ANSYS Workbench to calculate safety factor of the designed parts. Two prototypes were fabricated and were attached to the mobile robot for field tests. Tests were performed in indoor settings to measure the total draft force required to pull developed planters. Draft force was very close to the value that was calculated in design stage. Results showed that an average of 460 N pulling force is required to pull one row planter for 50 mm depth of cut, which can be compared to n existing CNH corn planter that requires a pulling force of between 900 N to 1300 N. Seed drop accuracy and function of the developed planters in opening and closing a packed soil in presence of residue, were also observed in outdoor tests.

Numerical procedures for reliable wheel and rail wear prediction are rare. Recent development of simulation techniques and computer power together with tribological knowledge do however suggest computer aided wear prediction as possible. The present objective is to devise a numerical procedure able to simulate profile evolution due to uniform wear sufficiently accurate for application to vehicle dynamics simulation. Such a tool should be useful for maintenance planning, optimisation of the railway system and its components as well as trouble-shooting. More specifically, the field of application may include estimation of reprofiling frequency, optimisation of wheel – rail profile match, optimisation of running gear suspension parameters, and recognition of unfavourable profile evolution influencing the dynamic response of the vehicle. The research contribution accounted for in this thesis includes, besides a literature review, modelling of the wheel – rail interface, benchmarking against traditional methods, and validation with respect to full-scale measurements. The first part addresses wheel – rail contact conditions in the context of wear simulation as well as tribological environment and tractive forces. The current approach includes Archard’s wear model with associated wear maps, vehicle dynamics simulation, and railway network definition. One objective is to be able to include variations in operation conditions in the set of simulations instead of using scaling factors. In particular the influence of disc braking and varying lubrication conditions have been investigated. Both environmental factors like moist and contamination and deliberate lubrication need to be considered. As part of the associated contact analysis the influence of tangential elastic deformation of the contacting surfaces has been investigated and found to be essential in case of partial slip contact conditions. The influence on the calculated wear of replacing the Hertzian contact by a non-elliptic semi-Hertzian method has been investigated, showing relocation of material loss towards increased profile curvature. In the second part comparisons have been carried out with traditional methods, where the material loss is assumed to be directly related to the energy dissipated in the contact. Attention has been paid to the understanding of the principle differences between the investigated methods, comparing the distribution of friction energy, sliding velocity, and wear depth. As a prerequisite, contact conditions with dependence on wheelset guidance and curving performance as well as influence of tractive forces have been investigated. In the final part validation of the developments related to wheel wear simulation is addressed. Disc braking has been included and a wear map for moist contact conditions based on recent tests has been drafted. Good agreement with measurements from the reference operation, is achieved. Further a procedure for simulation of rail wear and corresponding profile evolution has been formulated. A simulation set is selected defining the vehicles running on the track to be investigated, their operating conditions, and contact parameters. Trial calculations of a few curves show qualitatively good results in terms of profile shape development and difference in wear mechanisms between gauge corner and rail head. The wear rates related to traffic tonnage are however overestimated. The impact of the model improvements accounted for in the first part of the thesis has been investigated, indicating directions for further development. / QC 20110124

The aim of this diploma thesis is to design, manufacture and measure the characteristics of a mobile water pico turbine. More precisely, it is an experimental construction of a mill wheel. The first part of this document is describing the design and manufacture of the turbine. This part focuses mainly on the construction of water wheels with different sizes of buckets and on the nozzle supplying water to the turbine. There is also a CFD simulation of pressure loss of nozzle. The second part of the thesis is focused on the processing of data that were measured in the laboratory, including the determination of uncertainties. The measurements were performed for different turbine settings such as flow, speed, different wheel shapes and different positions of the nozzle distributing water to the wheel. For individual turbine settings are created characteristics, from which maximum powers and maximum efficiencies parameters are determined.

The Pyramidal Reaction Wheel Platform, or PRWP, is used to simulate three-axis controls in a torque free space-like environment. The primary purpose of the system will be to evaluate the effects of conjoining sensors to maximize pointing accuracy. Furthermore, the system will incorporate a star tracker in conjunction with a Simulated Star Field (SSF) to better estimate the PRWP orientation. For the sake of this document, however, the goal is to implement a gyroscope, wheel rate sensors, and a make-shift accelerometer—to the PRWP—and integrate a controls algorithm such that three-axis controls are achieved for the PRWP. Three sensors were either better integrated into the system or added altogether. Tachometers were created as a form of hardware circuitry to measure each wheel rate with an accuracy of approximately 2.5 Hz (nearly 15 radians per second). The TAC board circuitry converted each motors encoder output into a speed by use of a frequency to voltage converter. Additionally, although three gyroscopes had been implemented previously, the system was better incorporated into the model such that it was directly transformed via a ROBOSTIX ADC converter before being relayed to SIMULINK via a Bluetooth link. The MEMS gyroscopes allowed for very accurate rate measurements—with a minimum resolution of approximately 0.25 radians per second. Finally, a makeshift accelerometer was incorporated into the system for the purpose of system identification. The accelerometer was incorporated into the system by utilizing a discrete time derivative of the gyroscope readings. However, thankfully a system of two accelerometers can be later utilized to achieve an accuracy of approximately 6 degrees per second-second in the x-axis and 2-3 degrees per second-second in the y- and z-axes. A controls test was performed where the starting location was qo=[0, 0, sqrt(2)/2, sqrt(2)/2] and the target location was qc=[0, 0, 0, 1]. At 80 seconds, the pointing accuracy was 70 degrees around the target and the system was unable to settle during the 80 second trial. The inaccuracy was because of the low frequency of operation of the system—1 Hz. Additionally, the platform reacts slowly to sensor readings and commands. The coupling of these issues causes the pointing accuracy to high. Furthermore, through experimental testing, the maximum wheel rate was found to be approximately 6400 RPM at a duty cycle of 50% at an 8000Hz PWM application due to the Pololu MD01B design limitations: low voltage range (up to 16V), low limit current limiter (5A), and high susceptibility to overheating for large currents.

This thesis deals with design of front and rear suspension of single-seater sports car. Design and optimization of geometrical parametres of axles is followed after theoretical introduction. Another section is concerned with calculation of the vehicle suspension and design of the steering. The construction of individual components is described in the final section.

No description available.

Accurate estimation of the coefficient of friction (CoF) is essential to accurately modeling railroad dynamics, reducing maintenance costs, and increasing safety factors in rail operations. The assumption of a constant CoF is popularly used in simulation studies for ease of implementation, however many evidences demonstrated that CoF depends on various dynamic parameters and instantaneous conditions. In the real world, accurately estimating the CoF is difficult due to effects of various uncertain parameters, such as wheel and rail materials, rail roughness, contact patch, and so on. In this study, the newly developed 3-D nonlinear CoF model for the dry rail condition is introduced and the CoF variation is tested using this model with dynamic parameters estimated from the wheel-rail simulation model. In order to account for uncertain parameters, a stochastic analysis using the polynomial chaos (poly-chaos) theory is performed using the CoF and wheel-rail dynamics models. The wheel-rail system at a right traction wheel is modeled as a mass-spring-damper system to simulate the basic wheel-rail dynamics and the CoF variation. The wheel-rail model accounts for wheel-rail contact, creepage effect, and creep force, among others. Simulations are performed at train speed of 20 m/s for 4 sec using rail roughness as a unique excitation source. The dynamic simulation has been performed for the deterministic model and for the stochastic model. The dynamics results of the deterministic model provide the starting point for the uncertainty analysis. Six uncertain parameters have been studied with an assumption of 50% uncertainty, intentionally imposed for testing extreme conditions. These parameters are: the maximum amplitude of rail roughness (MARR), the wheel lateral displacement, the track stiffness and damping coefficient, the sleeper distance, and semi-elliptical contact lengths. A symmetric beta distribution is assumed for these six uncertain parameters. The PDF of the CoF has been obtained for each uncertain parameter study, for combinations of two different uncertain parameters, and also for combinations of three different uncertain parameters. The results from the deterministic model show acceptable vibration results for the body, the wheel, and the rail. The introduced CoF model demonstrates the nonlinear variation of the total CoF, the stick component, and the slip component. In addition, it captures the maximum CoF value (initial peak) successfully. The stochastic analysis results show that the total CoF PDF before 1 sec is dominantly affected by the stick phenomenon, while the slip dominantly influences the total CoF PDF after 1 sec. Although a symmetric distribution has been used for the uncertain parameters considered, the uncertainty in the response obtained displayed a skewed distribution for some of the situations investigated. The CoF PDFs obtained from simulations with combinations of two and three uncertain parameters have wider PDF ranges than those obtained for only one uncertain parameter. FFT analysis using the rail displacement has been performed for the qualitative validation of the stochastic simulation result due to the absence of the experimental data. The FFT analysis of the deterministic rail displacement and of the stochastic rail displacement with uncertainties demonstrates consistent trends commensurate with loss of tractive efficiency, such as the bandwidth broadening, peak frequency shifts, and side band occurrence. Thus, the FFT analysis validates qualitatively that the stochastic modeling with various uncertainties is well executed and is reflecting observable, real-world results. In conclusions, the development of an effective model which helps to understand the nonlinear nature of wheel-rail friction is critical to the progress of railroad component technology and rail safety. In the real world, accurate estimation of the CoF at the wheel-rail interface is very difficult since it is influenced by several uncertain parameters as illustrated in this study. Using the deterministic CoF value can cause underestimation or overestimation of CoF values leading to inaccurate decisions in the design of the wheel-rail system. Thus, the possible PDF ranges of the CoF according to key uncertain parameters must be considered in the design of the wheel-rail system. / Ph. D.

In this work, measurements and simulations were used to investigate the effects of grinding wheel topography on the geometric aspects of the grinding process. Since existing methods for measuring the grinding wheels were either not accurate enough or could only measure a small portion of a grinding wheel, a novel grinding wheel measurement system was developed. This system consists of a white light chromatic sensor, a custom designed positioning system and software. The resulting wheel scanning system was capable of measuring an entire grinding wheel with micron level accuracy. The system was used to investigate the effects of fine, medium and course dressing on grinding wheel surface topology and the resulting workpiece surface. New techniques were also developed to simulate metal removal in grinding. The simulation software consisted of a stochastic wheel model, dressing model and metal removal model. The resulting software could determine the uncut chip thickness, contact length for every cutting edge on a grinding wheel as well as the resulting surface roughness of the grinding wheel. The simulation was validated by comparing the wheel model used in the simulation to grinding wheel measurements and by comparing the simulated surface finish to the measured surface finish. There was excellent agreement between the predicted and experimentally measured surface topology of the workpiece. The results suggested that only 22 to 30% of the cutting edges exposed on the grinding wheel are active and that the average grinding chip is as much as 10 times thicker and 5 times shorter than would be produced by a grinding wheel with a regular arrangement of cutting edges as assumed by existing analytical approaches.

The aim of this thesis is to create a design rear upright for a racing Formula Student category car. It is necessary to propose a design group of the rear wheel assembly with the upright with all requirements related thereto, for example solutions camber settings. Everything is modeled using the CAD system. There is developed computational model which is placed in ballast states of strain and stress analysis by finite element method. There is also designed a suitable material for the production of the rear upright which is optimized. The conclusion deals with the inclusion of the proposed arrangement in the overall vehicle assembly and is concluded with evaluation and suitability of the proposed solution.

This master’s thesis deals with the construction of parts of a bucket-wheel stacker/reclaimer designed to operate lignite stockyard at coal power plant. First the basic parameters of machine and loads applied in service are defined. The work also includes the design of steel structure of bucket-wheel boom, bucket-wheel, buckets, bucket-wheel drive, shaft, bearings and other parts of bucket-wheel boom. These parts are verified by analytical or finite element analysis.