WEEK 13

 17/7/21

For this week's lesson we learnt about operating principles and mechanism designs.  

Mechanism principles refers to the mechanical movements that enables and enhances the operating principles. It is something that transforms forces and movement into a desired set of output forces and movement. We were introduced to 6 types of essential engineering mechanisms this lesson, actuators, gears, springs, cams, lever, and ratchets. 

The first part of the lesson just went past Ms Oh introducing us to these 6 mechanisms, explaining to us how it works and when it is used, which was a bit dry... However, the second part of the lesson got more interesting!  

We were to design a ping pong ball launcher that could shoot and reload ping pong balls based on the engineering mechanisms she went through and do a short presentation on it. This got our creative juices working. This got us excited as it reminded us when we were younger and would play with nerf guns around the playground with our friends. Hence, we decided to design the ping pong ball launcher based on a nerf gun.

We first researched how a nerf gun worked and found out that it used a spring and gear mechanism. As you pull back the bottom of the nerf gun to load the gun, the spring gets compressed and the gear connected to the nozzle gets pulled back as well. This compression accumulates the energy of the spring and the gear so once the trigger is pulled, it pushes out the ping pong all at a very high speed. 

The picture below is the ping pong ball launcher we designed 😋

For our presentation, we wanted to make it fun by giving it a theme. We opted for a Paris theme where this lady goes for a stroll in the park and gets attacked by a ping pong ball launcher. This gets her thinking, how does the ping pong ball launcher works that it attacked her from such a far distance? And when she finally got her answer, she went back home and concluded that it was good day! Oui~ 

We had a lot of fun creating the slides according to the Paris theme, giving a story line and presenting them as well. To us, it was hilarious 😂😂😂 Hopefully, the others felt the same way too... 

At the end of the lesson, we had to think of the operating principle for the chemical product we are designing. As we were discussing, it dawned on us that our product chosen was actually very lacking. It did not contain any chemical engineering principles and it was too mechanical. Hence, we decided that it would be best for us to change our chemical product. It feels a little rushed at this point to change our chemical product, but we felt that it was better than continuing with a lacking chemical product. This time, we will thoroughly look for something that involves a chemical engineering principle and that it is not too difficult to fabricate. By next week, we hope to have our new chemical product and the operating principle for it.