Blog Entry 4

Hi everyone!!! for this blog entry, I'll be talking about my experience with Practical 5, and how my partner and I managed to create a design to perform the egg drop challenge! 😁

When Mr Chua first told us what we had to do for this practical, I immediately felt anxious. I was extremely inexperienced with the Fusion 360 software, as we had only used it once before to make a simple photo frame, and to make things worse, we were following a guide the whole time! D:

With this practical, we not only were required to come up with a (somewhat) original design for the egg drop challenge, where some kind of design would have to be made to protect a quail egg from a drop height of 2 metres, but we would have to make it simple enough to be 3D printed, and also assemble and print the whole design ourselves! This task felt simply impossible, and thus, my partner Antriksh and I put it off as long as we could. However, we had to do it eventually, and thus, we came up with the following design!

Our Design

When we were first brainstorming a design to properly carry out the experiment, we thought of some criteria that had to be met in order for the design to succeed. Firstly, obviously, the design had to properly protect the egg from the drop. Secondly, the design had to be feasible to create using Fusion 360, and small enough to be 3D printed in a short amount of time, as well as being small enough to fit into the 3D printing space as at the time, we were kind of short on time after all our procrastination, so we could not afford to make too complex of a design. Finally, the design had to be simple enough for our tiny monkey brains to create, as my partner and I were both incompetent when it came to Fusion 360, and we were both extremely uncreative. Thus, after brainstorming, we came up with a simple design to protect our egg.

Our design consisted of 3 main parts. Firstly, a cylindrical inner container would be used to keep the egg protected. Secondly, a cubic outer container would hold the inner container, which would also have threading inside to securely hold onto the inner container. Finally, a thin rectangular cover would hold the egg inside the inner container, to ensure that the inner container does not drop out of the outer container, and to ensure that the egg does not drop out of the inner container.

(very) rough sketch of the outer container

(very) rough sketch of inner container

(very) rough sketch of the cover

Creating our design in Fusion 360

As our design consisted of three parts, this documentation would also consist of three parts, being

1. The Outer Container

2. The Inner Container

3. The Cover

1. The Outer Container

For the outer container, I first started out with a 50mm x 50mm sketch, followed by extruding upwards 60mm to create an outline for our outer container.

Next, I created a second sketch inside the outer container sketch to create the hole in the outer container that our inner container would be held in, followed up by extruding -55mm in order to create the hole.

After that, on one of the walls of the outer container, I created a third rectangular 45mm x 7mm sketch to extrude into, creating a hole on each side of the outer container for the cover to fit into.

Finally, at the bottom of the inside of the outer container, a small circular sketch was made, followed by extruding it upwards to create threading to hold the inner container.

And with that, the outer container was complete!

2. The Inner Container

The inner container was slightly more complex than the outer container, as its interior was curved downwards, but it was still feasible and rather simple.

I first started off with a circular sketch, then extruded it upwards 40mm to create an outline for the container. 

Next, I made a second circular sketch inside the first circular piece, to create the space for the egg to be held.

Next, a 15mm fillet was made in the base of the space for the egg to be contained, to create a sort of indentation for the egg to be held.

Finally, a small hole was threaded to securely hold the inner container in the outer container.

And with that, the inner container was done!! One last part to go!! :D

3. The Cover

The final part was also by far the easiest, as the cover was simply a rectangular block that would be used to hold the inner container inside the outer container, by being placed through the hole on both sides of the outer container.

A rectangular 70mm x 45mm sketch was made, followed by extruding it upwards 5mm.

Finally, all three parts were made!!! 🤩

Here's our finished product: 

Honestly speaking, when I first joined Chemical Engineering, I really did not imagine myself ever doing anything like this, but so far, the creation of our design really let me realise how fun and interesting using Fusion 360 could be!

3D Printing our design

Before we were able to start actually printing our design, we first had to go through a few preparatory steps, those being:

1. Saving the design in Fusion 360 as a .stl file

2. Importing the design into Ultimaker Cura

3. Saving the file in Cura as a .gcode file

4. Transferring the .gcode file into a thumbdrive

First, we had to export our design in Fusion 360 as a .stl file.

Next, in Ultimaker Cura, we opened up our file.

Finally, we exported the file as a .gcode file onto the thumbdrive in W3 to be sent to the printer!

To start doing that though, we first had to select the "Slice" option

Next, click on "Preview"

Press save to removable drive, and send the file to the thumbdrive in W3

Plug the thumbdrive into the 3D Printer in W3

And finally, load the filament roller onto the tray which is located below the 3D printer, and select the file you wish to print on the interface of the 3D printer!

And with that, after a super tedious process, the file was ready to start printing!

Here's a short clip of one part of our design; the cover, being 3D printed.

Finally, after our design was done printing, we took it out, and with that, we were done!!! We didn't shut down the 3D printer as there were people using it after us, but we would have if we could. 😃

Here are some pictures of our completed product!

Outer Container

Inner Container

Inner container inside outer container (imagine that a quail egg is inside)

Cover placed through outer container to protect the egg

Now onto the actual experiment, the egg drop!!! This was probably the most fun part of the entire practical, as we got to actually put our design to good use and drop it. I was really worried when we first started the egg drop, as I wasn't sure if our design would be successful, or if the container would break after our first drop, which would force us to make another design, which could mean that we wouldn't make our deadline! Lucky for us, our design was successful, and our egg was unharmed after the practical! Here's a video of our actual egg drop, and the end showing that the egg was raw 😁

And finally, after a long, tiring journey, we were done with Practical 5, and overall, I would call it an absolute success!!! I would like to thank my partner Antriksh for sticking with me throughout this whole practical and supporting me the whole way, I definitely could not have done it without him. Overall, I really learnt a lot about how the 3D printing process works, like how to use Fusion 360 effectively, how to transfer my design into Ultimaker Cura, and how to actually carry out the print. I would definitely do more 3D printing in the future, as this experience has definitely left me with a great experience! 🤩