Mechanical Design

Figure 1. Final support During the last two to three weeks, I have been researching and designing supports in order to support the solar panels on top of the main structure.  I came up with two designs; most components of both designs are made out of sheet metal. However, based on my knowledge, manufacturing the first model (figure 2 and 3) might be hard because of the length of the pieces and the type of bends that they require. Due to the difficulty of manufacturing this support, I decided not to complete my design and did not put any bolt holes on the support.  Figure 2. Solar panel support 1 (isometric view) Figure 3. Solar panel support 1 (front view) For the solar panel supporting rail, I used a GS-MR-L Grasol rail (figure 3). This rail is made by extruding aluminum. Grasol also manufactures mounts in order to mount solar panels on the rails. They use a specific type of extruded aluminum support beam to support the rails. This allows the assemblers to adju

Figure 1. Full model For the past few weeks, I have been working on the main supporting structure. The support has to be strong enough to withstand the cyclic loads, and also the weight of the tracks, solar panels, bogies and the pod cars. Instead of using the commonly used beams, our team is working with cross beams, invented by a South African company called Milotek. Cross beams are made out of sheet metal, which are then filled with concrete. Welding and drilling into sheet metal can reduce the strength of the structure. In order to avoid reducing the strength of the cross beams, we are trying to avoid welding and drilling into the cross beams. One way to connect cross beams is to use friction clamps. Figure 2 shows the current design of the friction clamp. Due to a non-disclosure agreement, I cannot show the exploded view of my designs, so it might be hard to fully understand the different aspects of the design. In the current design of the cross beam, two plates which ar