CAD Projects

This joint appealed to me specifically because it was aesthetically pleasing and has many degrees of freedom, meaning that it would prove to be a fun challenge to CAD. I have enjoyed this very much, and started the CAD component by component from start to finish, posting below renders and animations of the joint in action.

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The CAD Process

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I started with the CAD of the central axel. It was difficult because there were small rectangular ridges on the edge of the circular extrusion; doing a circular pattern for each rectangular ridge was not the most productive way to go about it, because there would need to be over 200 repeated patterns, and this would really slow down Fusion's processing speed every time I open up the CAD. So I decided to combine the components and this made things much easier to process. But in this project, the thing I found most difficult was definitely the revolute joints. There were so many and I had to get the dimensions for all the parts correct, otherwise the joint would not work and the components would crash into each other. I took me a few tries to realize that the horizontal track that enables the lever to move angularly was not an ellipse, which I thought intuitively made sense, but was a perfect circle. And then I had to coordinate all the revolute joints, and animate it, and this was very difficult because I had to open a motion study for all the appropriate joints and animate them. But I'm very satisfied with the outcome, and from the render I have posted on the bottom right, I feel that it has accurately portrayed the appearance of the mechanism, and I have definitely developed my CAD skills very much from this project.

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More on Reuleaux's Universal Joint

 

The double universal joint utilizes two Cardan joints in conjunction to transmit rotary motion about one axis to rotary motion about another axis. Reuleaux attributes this mechanism to Cardano, in the 16th Century. The angular relation of the axes requires the output speed to be constant when the input axel’s speed is also constant. Every relative angle between the two couplings and the axes are variable. The angular position is inscribed onto the model, so that one can take experimental data (Moon)