Computer Aided Design

Today, was my first lesson of the Chemical Product Design and Development module. 

In this module, we learnt that we would be able to gain various skills and techniques in chemical product development and experimental designs, and our end goal was to create a prototype of a chemical device as a team.

For the first part of the lesson, we formed our groups within the class, appointed our roles and set some ground rules.

Our module content consisted of  4 parts: 

• Design and Prototyping skills:
• Computer Aided Design (CAD) 
• Laser cutting  
• 3D Printing  
• Embedded programming
• Idea Refinement
• Project Management
• Experimental Design and Statistical Analysis

We looked at past year capstone projects to understand what we could make with laser cutting, and watched a video on a Negative air ion disinfection device, which was the capstone project made by our seniors in 2020.

We also watched videos on the very diverse objects that could be made with a 3D printer, and what interested me the most was that with an upscaled 3D printer, it was able to print out literal materials for building a life sized house. And with further research and development, we could eventually be printing out literal homes for people. And last but not least, we were also introduced to the importance of coding, as we were going to program an Arduino at some point of the lesson.

 

We watched and followed a tutorial for designing a keychain in Autodesk Fusion 360, which presumably was going to be used in our first practical in Week 3, which was laser cutting. Although I ran into some problems here and there, I eventually managed to complete the task. 

Here's how I did mine:

For the second part of the lesson, We also learnt about using parametrics in Autodesk Fusion 360. When designing something, there might be cases where the overall design has to be upscaled or downscaled, by utilizing a specific parametric when designing, for example: the Extrusion value of a thickness of 5mm, we can change that extrusion value to any value when scaling our design, instead of having to redo the entire design, which would be a huge waste of time. 

By using these parametrics, we were tasked to design a simple phone stand. Here's how I did it:

Step 1: Draw a 5mm by 150mm 2-point rectangle. 

Step 2: Draw 2 Diagonal Lines that meet each other at an angled point.

Step 3: Repeat Step 2 but with 2 longer lines.

Step 4: Add a circle of 5mm radius to the front of the rectangle and remove the bottom half to form an arc.

This is what the finished sketch looks like:

Step 5: By using a set parametric of ("thickness" = 100mm), I extruded my phone holder by the thickness value and filleted the sharp edge at the top:

Here is the final product:

After this lesson, I understood the usefulness of having custom parametrics to quickly edit dimensions, extrusions etc. instead of having to come up with an entirely new design, which would be a massive waste of time. For example, if i wanted my phone stand to cater to phones that were smaller than mine, i could just set my custom thickness parametric value to a value of <100mm.