Bridge & Thrust Chamber Design

Both of these projects originated from a class which, among other things, aimed at exposing students to areas of SOLIDWORKS typically unexplored by students outside of work experience. Below are two smaller projects from this class, one utilizing FEA and the other CFD both in SOLIDWORKS. Since these projects, I have since used FEA frequently in other classroom and extracurricular avenues as well as during my internship at CommScope, where I also explored FEA in Ansys, and I will soon be returning to CFD in SOLIDWORKS as well as COMSOL for future endeavors such as a class on Aerodynamics I will be taking in the spring.

Both projects involved design under a set of given constraints and performance requirements, optimizing for a certain metric, with bonus points as an incentive to the students who were able to create the most efficient designs. In the case of the bridge, the goal was to maximize load carrying capacity while minimizing weight. Shown is a stress diagram generated using SOLIDWORKS, showing that this final iteration of the bridge design performs well within the yield strength for the required load. However, if the project were to be done again, I would do one more iteration with a "X" pattern cut into the top, having beams connecting the inner corners, to further increase the efficiency of the structure. In the case of the thrust chamber, the goal was to maximize thrust while minimizing fluid volume with the overall design confined to a set size visualized by the shaded box overlaying the model. System parameters were determined using SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation, and the thrust was then calculated. The shown model reached the required thrust of 1050 kN, though it is also the least efficient of all of the tested iterations of the design.