The ball bearing motor mystery 2024
Contents
- 1 Supervisors
- 2 Honours students
- 3 Project guidelines
- 4 General project description
- 5 Specific tasks
- 6 Deliverables
- 7 Weekly progress and questions
- 8 Approach and methodology
- 9 Possible extension
- 10 Expectations
- 11 Relationship to possible career path
- 12 See also
- 13 References and useful resources
- 14 Back
Supervisors
Honours students
Project guidelines
General project description
The ball bearing motor is a mystery because to this day no engineer knows how it works! No one understands the physical principle at all. Your job is to do some experiments to investigate this motor and why it is that it rotates. Understanding the principle is important. It may not be useful for large motors, but it may be interesting for micromotors and micropumps that have numerous applications.
Step 1: Get the workshop to construct a ball bearing motor. It is simply a metal shaft with two ball bearing races either end. If you connect a power supply across the two races it spins at over 1000 rpm and it doesn't matter if it is AC or DC! The objective is to film it working using your smart phone and create and entertaining YouTube video demonstrating it working. This video will be something visual for your presentations and is very important.
Step 2: Use Comsol and/or Ansys to simulate the motor to see if you can investigate what happens in simulation. The trick here will be to simulate simpler versions of the motor that we will show you. The full ball bearing motor is too complex to simulate first off, so we must simplify.
Step 3: Characterize the motor. Using an encoding wheel and a photosensor, plot curves of torque versus angular velocity of the motor. For this part we recommend you use tiny ball bearings either from a hard disc drive or a dentist's drill.
Specific tasks
List out the specific tasks you need to do to complete this project:
- etc
- etc
- etc
Deliverables
Semester 1
- Start Project Work (Week 1)
- Proposal seminar (Week 5)
- Progress report (Week 12) - only one report needed in wiki format
Semester 2
- Final seminar (Week 10)
- Final report (Week 11) - only one report needed in wiki format
- Poster (Week 12) - one poster only needed
- Project exhibition 'expo' (Week 12)
- CD or stick containing your whole project directories (Week 13)
- YouTube video (Week 13) - add the URL to this wiki
Weekly progress and questions
This is where you record your progress and ask questions. Make sure you update this every week.
Approach and methodology
We expect you to take a structured approach to simulation, theory and experiment.
Possible extension
TBA
Expectations
- To get good marks we expect you to show a logical approach to decisively eliminating hypotheses.
- In your conclusion, you need to come up with a short list of likely possibilities and a list of things you can definitely eliminate.
- We expect all the written work to be place on this wiki. No paper reports are to be handed up.
- It is expected that you fill out a short progress report on the wiki each week, every Friday evening, to briefly state what you did that week and what the goals are for the following week.
- It is important to regularly see your main supervisors. Don't let more than 2 week go by without them seeing your face briefly.
- You should be making at least one formal progress meeting with supervisors per month. It does not strictly have to be exactly a month, but roughly each month you should be in a position to show some progress and have some problems and difficulties to discuss.
- The onus is on you to drive the meetings, make the appointments and set them up.
- You are expected to make a YouTube presentation of your whole project.
Relationship to possible career path
The skills you pick up in investigating this problem in terms of project management, simulation, and experiment will be relevant to a wide range of careers.
See also
References and useful resources
If you find any useful external links, list them here:
