ASTRONAUT'S COAT RACK

Skills: CAD, Design for Manufacture and Assembly, Rapid Prototyping, Conceptualization, Sketching

Machines: Laser-cutting

Software: SolidWorks

The goal of this project was to design and optimize mass of a bracket that supports a suit clip, which would be loaded with a 40 lb force for 10 seconds. The suit clip cannot deflect more than 0.25 inches, and the bracket must not interfere with the forbidden zones shown as brown blocks on the testing rig (shown on the left).

We started off brainstorming a lot of different concepts, and we evaluated free body diagrams, load analysis and simple failure analysis to quickly test our ideas. Next, we used inverse analysis to find free design parameters and modeled our design ideas for rapid prototyping. To further validate our analysis, we used SolidWorks Simulation to run results for part stress and displacement.

Through iteration of prototyping and stress analyses, we optimized our bracket to be 4 grams, which is approximately 4,500 times less than the weight of the 40 lb applied.