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Project Vision
The goal of the life cycle testing project is to showcase to students the interplay between design, analysis, and testing. Through the performance of physical experiments, finite element analysis (FEA), and the design of an instrumented machine that can conduct fatigue testing, a realistic testing system for an armchair will be developed.
There are many different aspects of engineering that come into play in the design, analysis, and testing segments of this project. Portions of this initiative, such as machine design, material selection, FEA, sensors, IoT enabled experiments, and industry 4.0, can be used to develop a wide range of meaningful and engaging projects for students across different engineering disciplines.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge that this project would not be possible without the help and hard work of many people from the Engineering Ideas Clinic and the University of Waterloo Faculty of Engineering. We would first like to extend our sincere thanks to Chris Rennick and Prof. Sanjeev Bedi for providing us with the opportunity to develop this project over the last four months, as well as their invaluable guidance along the way. Next, we would like to thank Andrew Gryguc for his constant advice, feedback, and mentoring in relation to developing a working FEA digital twin, as well as designing the instrumented chair testing machine. Additionally, we would like to thank Prof. Reem Roufail for her support in developing a material selection activity using aspects of this project. This will be run for the first time in the Winter 2021 term and will be the first integration of the life cycle project within the engineering curriculum. Finally, we would like to acknowledge Brian Shuh, a technician at the Engineering Machine Shop, for his outstanding patience and advice in helping us with machining the bell crank of the testing machine.