Rainbow engineering
This week of BESPIN blog is written by me, Oskar, aka "Tengil", part of the mechanical division.
Together with Jaka I design the experiment in terms structures, shape and stuff. As we are limited by room and mass it is very critical to optimize structures and placements of the components as well as possible. Also, let’s not forget the extreme loads during the experiment! This is where I come in. Either Jaka or I will design a piece of structure which will support a component, or some other cool equipment and I will do what’s called FEA or FEM (depends on where you’re from) to find out if the structure is sufficient to withstand the loads or not. “What is FEA/FEM?” I hear you ask. By doing a FEA/FEM analysis a CAD model is simulated with the desired load applied to it and out pops a beautiful picture with all the colors of the rainbow! These colorful pictures tell us if the design will make it or break it. I have attached a picture to explain what I meant.
This is a picture of a piece of aluminium under a simulated load of 300 g (gravitational pull) and its left side constrained of any movements.
Each color represents a number which is the figure of merit to decide if the model can take the load and is dependent on what material the model is made from. Below is a scale to help you understand the picture better.
Congratulations! You are now an expert in FEA/FEM analysis on structures!
This method is much appreciated by our head of economics compared to actual testing of the parts as testing is not only time consuming but quickly becomes expensive.
I spend most of my time working with this kind of simulations and looking at the colorful pictures one might even call me “the rainbow engineer”!