Tolerance Design

In mass production, it is common practice to consider the trade-off between assembly tolerance/quality and manufacturing capability/cost (see Fig. 1). The concept of tolerance design help assigning appropriate tolerance values with reasonable manufacturing cost meanwhile achieving the desired overall performance. This tool is also useful to analyze function anomaly and re-adjust origianl tolerance values.

 Fig. 1 Schematic drawing of trade-off between cost and performance

Mechanical Design Theory Semester Project: Ground Robots

Ground robot design and realization was a semester project of Mechanical Design Theory. Students were asked to build their own robots (no wheels allowed) to pass 3 predetermined stages as shown in Fig. 1. Stage A was a rectangular tunnel, stage B was a little hill, and stage C was a pair of cylindrical rods. Weight, successful rounds, total mileage, and time consumed were all performance indices taken into scoring.

Fig. 1 Racing field of ground robots

Design And Research of a Miniature Pneumatic Vibrator

Most conventional high-frequency vibrators used in ultrasonic applications like machining or welding processes generate the working power based on principles of piezoelectric or magneto-strictive effects (see Fig. 1 & Fig. 2). After entering the transducer, the time-varying electric input energy will then be transformed into solid-body vibration; however, the heat dissipated during energy transduction and the high-frequency electric input source has made them more complex of such transducers. Hence, in this work the use of pneumatic excitation was proposed as an alternative, which aimed to utilize the self-cooling property of gas and the availability of such phenomenon under constant air pressure.

Fig. 1 Common Langevin type piezoelectric transducers (courtesy of Tamura Corp.)

Design and Realization of a Whiskey Ice Feeding Machine

Fig. 1 Whiskey ice ball

The idea of this work was intended to build a whiskey ice feeding machine which stores and feeds ice balls (see Fig. 1). The marketing research of such machines was done and shown with great potential by the marketing management students of National Chung Cheng University. Collaborating with mechanical engineering students of National Taiwan University, the prototype was built and proved applicable. With the compelling demonstration and thorough marketing analysis, the group won the 1st prize of TiC100 Campus Entrepreneurship Competition in the final.

Design and Realization of a Long-Stroke Displacement Sensor Using Hall Elements

In this work magnetically sensitive electronic components called Hall elements were used to realize a long-stroke displacement sensor (see Fig. 1). Output voltage of Hall elements are induced by magnetic fields, and hence are sensitive to the proximity of ferromagnetic objects like magnets. By creating flux change in the magnetic circuit (see Fig. 2), induced voltage can be read out and used to calculate the actuated displacement.

Fig. 1 Illustration of a displacement sensor         Fig. 2 Possible magnetic flux change design