Soary Bird - Junior Design Project
Soary Bird was a project aimed at creating a museum exhibit for the Franklin Museum, situated in Philadelphia, PA. This exhibit teaches the principles of:
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1. Bernoulli's Aerodynamics
2. Biological Emargination in birds
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The requirement for this project was to teach one engineering principle and one biological principle. The thinking process generated three ideas:
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Small Heading
Wind Tunnel
Wind Tunnel teaching the Bernoulli's principle and the principle of emargination
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This concept was our top pick and consisted of a wind tunnel that would occupy aerfoils with genetic emargination and with no emargination.
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This concept was initially planned to have a joystick and individual buttons as user the user nterface. Later the game was coded on MatLab.
The Altutude vs. respiration concept compared the two aspects of bird flight and corelated them using an engaging interface. This also taught about relation between air pressure and altitude.
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The concept consists of a pressure box with a pump for a consistant flow of air to control the pressure inside. As the bird is made to go higher, the more the pressure drops inside the box and the more the reaction of the breathing will take place.
Bird Respiratory System
The Bird Respiratory System demonstrated the way birds breath and how birds possess varying number of air sacs. It also taught about fluid flow inside the lungs.
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This concept consists of balloons that can be sqeezed that simluate inhalation and exhalation of air. The concept will have manhy different sizes of balloons as inputs and different lung sizes as per the bird being tested. The output consists of the pressure and volume of the air that eneter the lungs.
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The outputs are related to varying birds that differ in altitude, flapping and such.
The Wind Tunnel was chosen as the best concept idea. It was constructed in one week using cardboard, Velcro, a DC fan and the Arduino Uno. The parts consisted the the test section, the compressor and the diffuser.
The marginated feathers can be seen at the tip of the wings where the feathers have gaps between them. This is shown my a 3D model which was later 3D printed.
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We learned that simpy machining industrial foam was quicker and required the use of less resources. Industrial foam aerfoils were used in the wind tunnel.
This is the GUI coded on MatLab that uses # of flaps. The emarginated and non-emarginated wings are used as the input.