Sustainable Mobility System for Silicon Valley Project

Today my team (Full-Scale Track Section) gave a presentation for the rundown on our specific project. We discussed past research, problems to overcome, project planning, and many other design obstacles that we will need to consider for our team. Below is the full presentation: After the presentations, we discussed with Ron Swenson about the project specifications and has mentioned that the SolidWorks drawings will be uploaded later this week. During the meeting, Ron mentioned the possibilities of integrating certain infrastructure like water pipes, power cables, and other tubing on the outsides of the vertical supports. There will also need to be diagonal bracing/trussing along the vertical supports. In addition to these requirements, the track will need to be designed so that it can be easily assembled and disassembled. This will make things easier later on during production when we will need to constantly adjust sections, and add parts during assembly of other team's par...

We are currently still waiting on the CAD drawings from Dr. Furman. Hopefully we will be able to get the drawings by next week and begin to start looking at the railings and drafting some parts. During the discussion of our full scale model, a couple key points came up about the structural integrity of the railings. In this discussion, Dr. Furman realized that having vertical supports every meter to hold the railings together would not be efficient enough to carry the weight of multiple or even one fully loaded tram. Because of this, we are planning on implementing trusses that will support the upper and lower beams more effectively and distribute the weight as if it was a thicker solid rail. This also brought up another similar topic on the weight distribution of the support columns. As we are only planning on doing one side of the track, the T shaped column will be split in half forming an upside-down L. This will put a lot of force as well as moment on the top beam as well as th...

Today we began to brainstorm a couple of ideas dealing with connecting the columns together and if they provided enough structural stability of the entire railway system. A problem that we face is that these columns cannot be bolted through or welded on to connect with each other. In order to stack these columns together, our only current option is to create a clamp design to hold them together. The second image above is a prototype design manufactured by the previous team on the rail system. While small scale makes this look feasible, on a full scale design there will be an extreme load as well as moment acting between these clamps. A possible solution of this design would be to make the clamp design longer to make the columns more stable. This can be seen by the rough sketch below: By extending the clamp, this adds more stability to the individual steel columns that are stacked on top of each other. In addition to that, this can also strengthen the whole column itself...