Because of a bunch of stuff, I missed a few weeks of making blog posts. But this is still the 6th week I have made a blog post.
I have done a massive quantity of stuff since I last made a post. Over February vacation, I spent approximately 18 hours working on the robotics team Technical Documentation.
When I got back I started working on the manufacture for the electronics skeleton. I started with the mounting plate. While making a spare part for the skeleton, The water jet broke. It most likely broke because a ware part had not been replaced for around twenty years. thankfully I had made 1 usable copy of the part I needed. I tapped the holes in it.
Next I made the threaded rods. I tried to use existing steel from the stock rack that I assumed was straight. it was to hard to be threaded normally, so I tried to thread it on the lathe. The stock that I had cut turned out to not be straight, so it wasn’t working.
Then I tried to Turn my own out of 3/16 aluminum rods. It worked, however the surface finish was very poor and inconsistent. after having finished 1 and 1/2 rods, someone found a pre-existing 1/4 inch rod with 1/4 20 threads on each end. This was exactly what I wanted, so I cut it in half and used those rods instead.
I finished the rounded front panel for the research project; It sealed excellently.
During every Wednesday I could, I went up to the pool with Miles and Jonas to do testing for the Hydrodynamic efficiency research project. I Just barely had enough time to do each run.
When I was analyzing the data 2 days before the science fair, I realized that most of the videos were too low quality to get any data from.
After opening the files in VLC media player, I was able to get data from 2 of the 20 runs. Because I was unsatisfied with the data, I worked with my dad to use Autodesk CFD (Computational fluid dynamics) to analyze the rounded front panel.
The general conclusion of the project was that the rounded front panel increased speed by 20% for the ROV. The CFD showed that on the tube alone, it reduced the experienced drag force by approximately 50%.
Cleaned out my box
Abstract:
In this study both computational and experimental techniques were used to determine the effect adjustments to the shape of a submersible remote operated vehicle (ROV), have on its drag. Decreasing drag can improve the efficiency and maneuverability of underwater ROVs (Sairam & Kumar, 2023). Although it is commonly known that streamlining a body will usually reduce its drag coefficient, determining whether it is worth the time, effort, and money to streamline an ROV is exceedingly difficult. This difficulty stems from the massive complexity involved in computational fluid dynamics along with the inaccessibility of wind tunnels, the standard tools for evaluating drag forces.
This study utilized physical experiments to determine how significant an improvement could be achieved by the proposed components, along with determining whether it is worthwhile to create new components for the sole purpose of drag reduction. This experiment also lays out intuitive guidelines to determine how to design components to minimize drag. This experiment used SUNK Robotics’ JONA ROV as a test platform, with 3D printed components mounted to it as the variable. Three types of components were tested. The extrusion shroud components were predicted to have an increase in average velocity, on the order of 3%. The same was predicted for the slim tube clamps. The rounded front panel was predicted to increase average velocity 20%. Most experimental data was inaccessible due to low video resolution. To make up for that lost data, computational fluid dynamics was used to gather clearer results.
