September 2021 - June 2024
Fabrication and Design Essentials
Fabrication and Design Essentials (or FADE) is a part of the American Societies of Mechanical Engineers branch at UCLA. FADE is a program that teaches students engineering skills that are essential to the field, such as 3D CAD modelling with SolidWorks and OnShape, Hardware and Software with building circuitry and coding it with Arduinos, and Manufacturing using lathes, mills, 3D printing, and CNCs. During my freshmen year, I went through this program as a student. In my sophmore year, I was a mentor. During my junior year, I became the lead lead of this program, and introduced new projects to improve student retention and final project completion rates. This page shows some of the skills I learned during my freshmen year, as well as changes I made as a lead.
CAD Skills with SolidWorks
By the end of the quarter of FADE, we created a final project to display the skills we had learn. For my final project, I created a working phone projector.
Scissor-jack Holder
To hold the phone, I created a scissor jack assembly with an indent dimensioned for my phone. With this scissor jack assembly, the phone would be able to move up and down the projector for focusing needs.
Bottom Casing
For the periscope to work, I decided to make 2 portions, a bottom casing and top casing. The casing in it's entirety would be black in color as that would be optimal for light transmission without reflection. The bottom casing would have the scissor-jack phone holder at the bottom attached to it. The top casing was also generated to slot into this bottom casing.
Periscope Mechanism
For the projector to work, I decided to use a periscope mechanism. As the light from the phone travels up the projector, it would hit the mirror above, which is angled at 45 degrees. From here, the light would be reflected into the lens, which would be placed into the hole shown. From here, the light would be projected onto the opposite screen.
The final phone projector looked as so. This could easily be 3D printed and manufactured. While this project was relatively simple, it was fun for me to apply my learned skills for the first time in university to create something that I could feasibly manufacture and use on a daily basis. This motivated me to stay in FADE later on, and even become a mentor.
In my second year, as a mentor, I've helped students firstly learn the basic skills of SolidWorks. I've also held office hours for my mentees, through which I've helped guide them through their own final personal projects, and help them when they get stuck so they can generate something of their very own. Throughout the last year, my skills have also greatly developed, and from here, I was able to help my mentees incorporate more complex features into their own final projects, for example, one of my mentees wanted to create a bicycle for their final project, and from here, I helped them learn how to use gear features and mechanical mates to generate a working, moving cycle.
As a lead I initated a buildathon day, where we provided food and drinks alongside with a full day of support from me, my co-lead, and our mentors to help students build their own final projects by the end of the day, and improve the final project retention rate. With this, we indeed saw a huge increase in final projects that were presented and submitted. The final project of our students from this quarter can be found here.
This quarter, my co-lead and I also built 2 new lectures to teach skills we thought were valuable from our experience in other engineering projects and past internships. The first one was on tolerancing and design for manufacturing while the second one was on design mechanisms. These lectures can be found here.
Manufacturing Skills
During my manufacturing quarter, I learned how to perform FEA analysis using SolidWorks, fluid simulations, use the lathe and mill. Our project was to create a miniature chair by the end of the quarter, however, due to Covid and time constraints, and technical issues with CNCs, we were only able to finish creating the legs and seat of the chair.
TUF Testing
For the first part of our quarter introducing us to the basics of manufacturing and FEA analysis, we created a TUF project, which we 3D printed, and then tested against a hydraulic press. Our TUF had limitatios, where the final design had to be no larger then 3 in x 3 in x 3 in, and had to be under 100 g. Our challenge was to create a piece that could take the largest force before deforming. For my piece, I decided to create a piece with a honeycomb design, inspired by nature honey combs as they were always quite sturdy. To truly test the limits of this honey comb design, I printed it out with 20% infill, instead of near 100% as most other students did, and 2 mm layer height. Under the hydraulic press, my design was able to experience just under 30kN of force before deforming. This was also my first introduction to stress and strain analysis.
Below, you can see a video of my design as force is increased, and the following video shows the effectst of the force. A big pro of my design was not that it was only strong, but it also deformed evenly, hence was less susceptible to snapping and would continously perform well pretty evenly across the design.
After the TUF design, I learned more about FEA analysis and fluid dynamic simulations through built in walk throughs of these programs from existing designs. I then started the project of building a miniature chair out of steel, learning how to use a lathe and mill to create holes for the pegs of the legs to attach to the seat of the chair, and holes on the base of the chair too. I also used other more simple machines, like the band saw, to cut up the pieces roughly before more definitively polishing it.
When I returned as a mentor for my sophmore year, we changed the design project to creating a tape dispensor. We used the same instruments: a lathe, mill, band saw, used a 3D printed component, drill press, and CNCs.
an engineering spin on
The Egg Destroy Challenge
During my time as a lead at FADE, I wanted to introduce a project that helped students understand how material types impacted strength and durability, and how certain materials would act better in certain types of failure types. With this goal, my colead and I came up with a modified version of the egg-drop challenge, which we called the egg destroy challenge. In this challenge, we wanted to discern between elastomeric materials, rigid and brittle materials, strong but flexible materials, isotropic and non-isotropic materials. These specific material properties were decided as they could be manufactured by means of 3D printing within UCLA’s makerspaces.
The materials that were assigned to students to design with were:
PLA (Polylactic Acid): Rigid and brittle, High ultimate strength, non-isotropic, easily printable
Resin: Rigid and brittle, higher ultimate strengths than PLA, isotropic
TPU (Thermoplastic polyurethane): Flexible, (slightly) Lower ultimate strength, Non-isotropic, Slightly harder to print
Ecoflex (silicone based material): Not 3D printable (need to 3D print a mold), extremely flexible, soft, elastomeric
With these materials, we had students design models that would protect an egg for these different materials. With those different designs, we then manufactured their models and tested their models ability to protect the egg with the different materials using different failure modes. For example, for one test, we threw the egg on the floor, simulating an impact based failure mode. For another, we had students slowly stomp on the egg, simulating an overload failure mode. We also allowed students to try bending the designs to simulate buckling, and allowed students to try prying the object open with tools, in which harder materials like PLA and resin performed better. Overall, TPU came out as a winner despite its comparitvely lower ultimate strength, as it had a good balance of a high enough ultimate strength while being slightly ductile and non-isotropic.
Some images of some of the designs students made and printed can be seen below!
