RE: [PSUBS-MAILIST] University Competition

[Danny Campbell <danny.campbell@usa.net>]

Wade,

Hi!  I've been reading with interest about your competition.  I'm usually
lurking (silent running) in this group and have learned a tremendous amount
about subs from some of the "Old Masters" here.  One thing you said in the
post below caught my attention and I think I may be able to help.

I am a mechanical engineer and I work with a DoD facility that builds flight
simulators.  We do all of our mechanical design in Pro/ENGINEER.  Your friends
are half right about it being hideously expensive.  It used to cost about
$25,000 a license until other products such as SolidWorks started giving them
some competition.  You can now get a boiled down version of ProE for around
$6,000 but I believe you lose some of the functionality, specifically with the
ability to work with assemblies and creating parts in assemblies.  In our
facility we have to document the final product for our customer and quite
often they don't have ProE either and we have to export the 2-D drawings in
AutoCAD format.  ProE is quite capable of outputing to other formats like
that.

At work (during my breaks of course (wink-wink)) I've been toying around with
conceptual sub designs of my own.  One thing ProE is great about is having the
ability to assign material properties such as density and you can easily find
the C.G.  Center of Bouyancy is another issue but give me time to tinker with
it and I'll figure that one out in ProE as well.

I'm offering my services, limited though they may be, to take your designs and
run them through Pro/ENGINEER at my office to check for weight and CG,
inertias, and possibly to draw up some of the components.  We are kinda busy
at work but I think I could find some time for such an effort.  And, I get to
learn something along the way.  Please feel free to contact me about this
effort.

v/r,

Danny

"Wade Carson" <wacarson@interchange.ubc.ca> wrote:
Suds,

Actually, the competition requires that the sub be two man (buddy system
type thing).  This also allows for one pilot to concentrate on propulsion
and the other to concentrate on direction which equates to less crashed
subs.  In actual fact we have already begun construction of the hull (with
the competition only a few months away we are a little pressed for time to
get the thing in the water for testing.  The aluminum frame is not for
structural purposes in the hull, it is just to attach all of the systems.  I
like your idea of embedding plates in the fibreglass, that never occurred to
me but I'm afraid at this point it will have to be a consideration for next
years sub.  The aluminum was a cost issue.  We can get all the free aluminum
we need so it made the choice there pretty easy.  As for the foam core, our
predecessors had the same idea but unfortunately they spent so much time
sanding the thing down that they never got it into the water.  We took it
out for testing in the pool a few months ago (middle of winter in an outdoor
unheated pool with minimal thermal gear! How's that for dedication.)  The
thing took several hundred pounds of extra weight just to get it under.
With 1/4" acrylic would I need to worry about it thinning to much during the
forming?  Another question regarding the controls is whether there is
significant electrolization between aluminum plating and stainless steel
fasteners and if so will teflon tape solve the problem?  I would put the
drawings that we have up here but unfortunately, several members of the team
insisted that they be prepared in PRO-Engineer.  THere are a few advantages
to this but I think there are more disadvantages. One of them being the
difficulty in distributing the drawings.  If you have access to a copy of
pro-e let me know, but my understanding is that it is a ridiculously
expensive program and so not a lot of people use it.  The other big
disadvantage is that the files get very large very quickly.  At the moment
I'm having trouble just getting them onto my computer so that I can work on
them.  Oh well, I'll see what I can do.  Thanks again for the advice.

Wade



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