Flying Sea Turtle
Summer 2022
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Amao Chan's Flying Sea Turtle was assigned as the first project when I took Additive Manufacturing. It consists of 14 separate pieces which we were given the freedom to print in any combination of FDM and SLA methods as long as we used both. For my turtle, I chose to make the entire model of FDM parts except for the gears and drive shaft to help it fly smoother due to the better surface finish and increased strength of resin parts. The next assignment was to use software to modify the turtle's shell in two ways, latticing and generative design.
Lattice Shell
The lattice shell was created in nTopology. The original shell was divided into two parts before meshing - one that remained unchanged so the shell could still clip to the turtle and another that was free to be latticed. Two spherical volume lattices were merged together to create the mesh (top) which was then exported and rejoined with the clip portion of the shell using MeshMixer (bottom).
*My shell was used as the benchmark for an A on this portion of the project*
Generative Design Shell
The generative shell was designed in Altair Inspire to maximize stiffness while preserving at least 30% of the original mass. To create the design space, shown above in red, the original geometry was simplified by filling in the clip portion on the bottom of the shell. External geometry was then added for loading to be applied to (top, middle). Support plates are shown in gray while force plates are shown in blue. All forces are 200 Newtons. NURBS were used to smooth the resulting shell (bottom) before exporting and re-adding the clips to the underside of the shell in Fusion360.
*Changes were made the semester I was the lab assistant for the course. The first assignment was still to print Amao Chan's Flying Sea Turtle but only use FDM printers to do so. SLA printing was made into a separate project, the BU Keychain and Magnet. The second assignment was replaced with the Optimized Catapult Arm*
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