Overall Completion

This is our final product of the physical model of our Engineering Design Laboratory Project. The main challenge of creating the model is making the precise cuts for each part and using wood glue to piece it altogether. It is not an exact replica of the Canadian National Tower but a representation of it. Steven, was in charge of making the physical model during the last week since he's more experienced with making applicable cuts with wood. Linh Al was in charge of finishing up the CAD model and Visual Analysis results which is all located in the final report. Michael and Yuan focused on writing up the presentation and putting the finishing touches to the final report. Now we're ready for our presentation ! 

New Parts for Physical Model

For the physical model, we have constructed the hexagonal base and the four caissons which is the primary foundation for the CN Tower. We went to the wood shop and utilized their tools to make the right parts for the tower.

For this week's assignment, we had to mainly focus on making the parts of the physical model and fixing up the Visual Analysis Model. From the previous post of our blog, Island was in charge of fixing the Visual Analysis Model so that it would not fall apart anymore while applying loads to it. Yuan is currently fixing up the Final report for grading in week 10, Michael updates the blog by posting about current progression, and Steven works on the physical model of the tower.

Here are some pictures of the parts we made at the wood shop :

We needed to sand down the sides of the 360 restaurant to make the slants of the part.

This is a picture of the primary parts of the foundation for the tower. There's a hexagonal base below the tower and above the 4 caissons for a strong foundation.

A picture of how the foundation will look like under the tower when all put together.

The main difficulty this week was having the correct visual analysis model because of importing different parts from Creo Parametric. The only solution was to make the tower as a whole and it was correctly shown in the result view. Also, since we don't have considerable experience with the wood shop, some measurements of the parts were inaccurate. We did our best to make the precise cuts that corresponded with the scaled down measurements of the tower. 

Update On Visual Analysis

Last week, we discussed that there were problems involving importing the revolving restaurant portion of the CN Tower to Visual Analysis. There was also another problem that occurred when going onto result view. We realized that importing an assembly would cause the tower to fall apart because an assembly is just a bunch of parts connected together. We tried to fix this by changing deleting nodes and changing around members, however that proved to be tedious and inefficient. Examples of what we tried to do can be seen in figure 1 and 2.

figure 1: The circled nodes were deleted and replace with just one node.

Figure 2: The nodes were replace and a new member was made to represent connectivity between parts

We decided to create a new 3D CAD model, specifically made to import to Visual Analysis. This time the whole CN Tower would be made into one part, meaning no assembly. This way there would be no parts falling when the model is imported into Visual Analysis. The new part consisted of a new, more simplified version of the revolving restaurant, as shown in figure 3. 

Figure 3: New revolving resturant. 

It was successfully imported to Visual Analysis with surprising no problems at all! The new revolving restaurant did not affect the stiffness matrix of the tower, and no parts fell apart, as the whole CAD model was just one part. Figure 4 shows that the tower functions properly in Visual Analysis, and all the parts of the CN Tower moving as one. 

Figure 4: Result view of new imported CN Tower CAD model

Load analysis will be under way! We predict to finish sometimes this week. 

Physical Model Progress

For this week's goal in terms of the Physical Model of the CN Tower was to construct the pod , the revolving restaurant. Since the wood materials are not thick enough to make the whole pod, we cut out two circular pieces from the wood.

Using the extra piece of wood we had, the wood material of the revolving restaurant was cut out like this. 

These two pieces will then be glued together in order to make the revolving restaurant. However, we still need to make a bigger hole of these circular pieces so it can fit with the shaft of the tower. The difficult process will be making the restaurant actually revolve, which means that we will have to lathe the shaft. So far, the physical model looks like the following : 

Update on Visual Analysis

This week was focused on finding the error that occurred when importing the 3D computer model into Visual Analysis. Finding the error in the whole 3D model proved to be impossible. Each part of the computer model was imported into Visual Analysis and examined one at a time. Once imported, the parts were pinned to the bottom to see if they were structurally sound.

We found out that the error only occurred with the top portion of the tower. The revolving restaurant and above displayed several errors in the result view.

Afterwards, each part that did work was assembled together one part at a time and imported to Visual Analysis to see if there was any problems that occurred with importing assemblies of the parts into Visual Analysis. The result view was displayed, even after all the whole assembly of the tower, with the exception of the top, imported.

However, one thing was realized once the result view displayed. Visual Analysis did not see the 3D model as one part, except several different parts.

As shown in this picture, one of the wings falls off in the result view.

Draft for Final Proposal

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByKCbu-_5kaBMUtvN29tZ1dnYWM/view

To view the PDF file of our draft of the Final Proposal, look at the above link.

The remaining work we will be doing is focusing on making the physical model and analyzing the Visual Analysis model of the tower.

Wings Constructed !

After Engineering Design Laboratory class, we went to cut out our wings from the piece of wood with the drawings. The pictures above is a good idea of how the CN Tower will look like with the constructed wings. The next thing we will work on for the tower is the core and the pod.