CAMAL campers had a wide range of additive and rapid prototyping experiences over the course of the week, but the last few days were directed towards their team competition for the best GE engine bracket design. The Campers challenge was to create a version of this titanium GE bracket, used to mount jet engines;
T hat was stronger and lighter. For the sake of cost and time, we converted the above to a resin-based 3D printed and scaled version, seen below:
As always, click or tap to enlarge the photos.
The student versions were printed within the same machine (our Stratasys Objet 350) and the same build as the GE Bracket above. Every effort was made to be sure we were comparing apples to apples, in a polymers sort of way.
Friday arrived, and so did the parents to see what the CAMAL Campers had accomplished in one surprisingly short week. Everyone piled into Harvey West’s testing lab, where Harvey had devised a system to test each of the Camper designs on our ATS Series 1620 20,000 lb. capacity universal testing machine. Harvey tested each design to failure, including the original GE design. The results:
- Using a formula to compare the strength to weight ratio of each design, every single one of the Camper design’s was better than the GE Bracket!
- One design, the result of amazing creativity, ingenuity, and the practical application of real engineering tools, beat the GE Bracket not only in a strength to weight ratio comparison, but also beat the GE Bracket in real terms. That means it took more weight to break it than it did the GE Bracket!
And the winner was (drum roll, please…) the bracket in the Universal machine, left below.
After the competition, tours, food, and fun ensued. The winning prize was a Tervis Tumbler for each member of the winning team, seen above right.
We enjoyed our very first Additive Camp. We hope it won’t be our last.