Week 5 - Spartan Superway Internship

During week 5 of the Spartan Superway internship, I began converting my drawings to sheet metal. In my previous design, I had created a design that called for sourcing outside materials and requiring welding to put the pieces together. By using sheet metal, we can reduce costs and manufacturing time, thus overall increasing build efficiency. To do this, I spent a good part of the week learning how to utilize the Sheet Metal function in Solidworks.

I first began by creating the outer unit that will bolt the panels onto the L beams. We also learned that the track will now be wider, so I remade the design to accommodate for this change. In the pictures below, you can see the difference between the first design and the new sheet metal design. The new sheet metal design features thicker flanges which should help it hold its shape and be more structurally sound.

Figure 1: Older design

Figure 2: New sheet metal rack design

The advantages of using sheet metal is that they can be produced much easier. The sheet metal is cut using a laser cutter and is then folded into shape using presses and other industrial tools. This method will require much less man hours when it comes to welding, and considering how long we plan to create our tracks, this will certainly help with efficiency. By flattening the rack in Solidworks, we can see how each piece would be cut out from the sheet metal. 

Figure 3: Rack flattened down

The next steps are to create structural pieces on the inside of the rack that will help with vertical stresses acting on the rack and solar panels. Unfortunately while I was designing these pieces I had experienced technical errors with my computer and lost a good amount of information. Thankfully most of the designs I had saved were able to be recouped, but lost the ones I was working on. We will also be looking to revise the side panel mounts and looking towards creating designs using sheet metal instead to be more visually pleasing.