Week 13 Blog Entry

 Reflection:

Today's lesson covered operating principles & mechanism design for a product. Operating principles are basically how things work and all devices, equipment and apparatus are designed based on a working principle that are either mechanical, chemical, electrical or magnetism. We learnt some examples of operating principle that we see in our practical workshop such as the distillation that works on principle of volatility and devices in our daily lives such as the air-lift pump in a coffee maker that works on principle of buoyancy. With this, we were tasked to think about what operating principle our chemical product is based on. Our discussion are as shown: 




Next, we learnt about the importance of mechanism in a product. Mechanism is important as it helps to enable and enhance the working principle the product is based on. Without mechanisms, the product is not functionable and hence are required. In the context of engineering, mechanism transforms forces and movement into a desired set of output forces and movement. There are 6 essential engineering mechanisms which are: 

    1. actuators - converts stored energy into motion where its principle are electric, hydraulic and pneumatic 

    2. cams - converts rotational shaft into simple or complex reciprocating linear motion 

    3. gears - transmit torque and to adjust rotational velocity and the common types are spur, rack & pinion and bevel

    4. lever - transmits and amplifies force by fixing the input and output about a fulcrum

    5. ratchet - locks in one direction

    6. springs - stores and dissipates energy and the common types are plate spring, cylindrical spiral extension spring (no gaps) and cylindrical spiral compression spring (has gaps)

With this knowledge, we were then tasked with an activity to design our own ping pong ball launcher that can shoot and reload ping pong balls. Our very own ping pong ball is shown below: 


Thus, operating principles and mechanism in the designing of a product is important as it helps us to construct and test our product so that we know how to use it.

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