Kinematic Sculpture
Project Description
Throughout my sophomore dynamics class, I was tasked with working on this Kinematic Sculpture Project. In phase 1, I had to design a moving mechanical system that exhibited translation, rotation, and general plane motion. After doing some looking around on http://507movements.com/, I found a mechanical movement that intrigued me. I decided to build a rotating polar slot that would move a linear slide attached to a linkage that turned a rotating disc. This sculpture satisfied the requirements of the project and additionally was a fun challenge to design.
In phase 2, I was tasked with coming up with a mathematical model for the sculpture. After doing a mathematical analysis of the system using relative motion and reference frame analysis, I discovered a mathematical relationship between the angle of the driving gear and the height of the linear slide. Due to the complex nature of the polar curve, I was unable to find an explicit relationship between my variables on paper, so I approximated a relationship using Matlab.
To confirm my findings, I used a video tracker to determine visually the relationship between the gear and the slider. The tracker data ended up proving that my model was very good at predicting the relationship between the driving gear and the slot. This multiple phase project was a fun and interactive way to expand my kinematics knowledge, design ability, and data analysis skills.
This is the concept I was interested in re-creating.
I designed the polar slider/gear combo in SolidWorks. The arm linkage and other disc were added later.
The motion tracking process was much easier than I expected. I was excited to learn how to use this fascinating technology.
My final report for phase 2 is below: