UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA

Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering

MACHINE DESIGN
MOW 312
Semester Test 2
June 2020
Lecturer: RJ Huyssen
Student: Initials Surname Student #
Instructions:
Fill in your name and student # above.
Rename and save this document as ‘MOW312 ST2 Surname Initials.docx’ now (and frequently resave).
Read the entire Question Paper carefully and together with the Survey (the Answer Book).
Consider answering in this document as a backup (use 1, 2 or 3… to record your choice from the Survey).
Use the Survey as your Answer Book, copy and paste from your document where appropriate.
The Link to the Survey is:
https://pretoria.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_d6xBdCneBlAvpU9

Use g = 10 m/s2 and air density ρ = 1 kg/m3 in any approximations.

Books and notes are allowed, no communication on content with other individuals allowed.

Marks 60 Time: 90min

Themes Addressed
• Pressure Vessels Welding & Bonding Heat Treatment of Materials
• Non Destructive Testing Gears

1
[You may delete this page or any images if you wish to submit this backup.]

2
 Question 1
[20]

Background
Your design team is working on the design of a Small Personal Vehicle (SPV) as part of a feasibility study.
The main vehicle specifications have been derived in project Milestone 2. Milestone 3 investigated the use
of the vehicle main structure as pressure vessels (PVs) to store the energy needed to do the drive work as
compressed air. The layout and sizes for this structure have also been proposed. The next step is to consider
the manufacturing and testing of prototypes of some of these PVs. Only a few PVs are to be made from steel
to be subjected to pressure and crash tests. Your team is currently preparing a design review report of which
extracts are shown below. You are required to provide some specialist information.

Extract from Report

The vehicle uses a low-pressure buffer PV, the blue PV in Fig. 1, as a suspension strut for the rear wheel.
This holds the air motor with a gearbox, on which the wheel is mounted. This buffer PV is shown enlarged
in Fig. 2 and a cut-away in Fig. 3 shows how the two PVs are joined with a big hole of 45 mm in diameter to
make it act as one PV. The two vessels are welded together at the joint shown by the welding symbol in
Fig. 2 (a groove weld with no gap, a bevel edge, welded all around). A filler material of superior strength
will be used to weld this joint. The maximum operating pressure PMax for this PV is labelled as 12 Bar. This
pressure would cause a Force on the welding joint of 12.3 kN, which will induce a Stress in the joint of
11 Mpa.

The following Assumptions were made to arrive at these estimates:

• only axial stress was considered
• to simplify, the curvature of the welding joint was ignored
• the filler material is stronger than the base material
• the joint is without welding defects
• no other loads are acting on the structure
A Load Factor n of 1.1 is to be used and the effective Safety Factor SF in the joint should never be less
than 5 since welding joints are considered as ‘defects’. When working out the effective SF for a given wall
thickness, the strength of the base material should be used.
For this joint on the prototype buffer PV a filler is needed and the welding technique of TIG welding is
proposed. This gives a high quality weld with a small HAZ. While done by hand and rather slow, this
technique does not require any special setting up, helpful when only a few samples need to be made. With
this technique the risk of inclusions is rather low.

3
 Question 2
[20]

Background
The development of a manufacturing sequence will require consideration of material properties and heat
treatment processes together with techniques of NDT. Again, you are required to provide some specialist
information for the report.

Extract from Report

The tubes of the vehicle frame shown in Fig. 1 are made as pressure vessels for the high storage pressure of
230 Bar. Straight seamless steel tubes arrive from a supplier together with a reliable material certificate. For
an acceptance inspection the uniformity of the wall thickness must be checked all along the length of the
straight tubes. For this purpose the technique of ultra sound inspection will be suitable. The tubes then
need to be cut to length and their ends need to be machined in preparation for the welding of the end domes.
It is recommended to do heat treatment before these processes:
• to improve resilience
• to relief residual stresses
• to soften the material for the machining
• to make it more ductile for the bending operations
The treatment of annealing would be recommended.

All end domes are already machined to have M20 treaded holes for pressure fittings. These are then welded
onto both ends of the straight tubes. The welding joints then need to be inspected on the inside for
incomplete penetration. For easy screening purposes, this could at first be done by means of a visual
inspection by camera (borescope or fibre scope). If a defect is found, this could be quantified by means of
an ultra sound inspection. In the next step, the tubes would be bent into their required shape.
Further heat treatment is recommended after the welding and after the bending. The material property which
the final PVs should have to serve in the occupant protection frame is best toughness. This can be obtained
by hardening & tempering. It can be expected that some distortion due to the heat treatment will require
some corrections to the bending to obtain the final shape.

4
 Question 3
[20]

Background
During Milestone 3 of the development of the SPV the drive work requirements were estimated to find out
how much energy needs to be stored on board for the pneumatic drive train. This drive train involves a
single air motor to drive the rear wheel of the vehicle through a gearbox. For Milestone 4 a preliminary
gearbox design needs to be done. For this purpose, it is necessary to know the power requirements of the
vehicle so that the specifications for the gearbox can be finalized. Again, you are required to provide some
specialist inputs to this report.

Extract from Report

From work on Milestone 2 & 3, estimates could be made for a variety of vehicle parameters as shown in the
table on page 2. From a literature study, it was found that a gearbox efficiency of 93% should be a
reasonable value for first order estimates of the gearbox performance. For the first specifications for the
gearbox, the vehicle all-up weight of 3600 N is used. At the constant speed of 90 km/h the wheel of
diameter 0.6 m would be rotating at a speed of 796 rpm (revolutions per minute). The power required
against rolling resistance of the vehicle is 1.4 kW. Assuming no wind or rain, the power required against
aerodynamic drag is 4.1 kW. A gear ratio of 4 has been found to provide a suitable match between the lower
torque of the air motor and the higher torque demand on the driving wheel for a single motor driving one
wheel in a bicycle arrangement. At this vehicle speed, the air motor shaft rotates at 3183 rpm at which the
shaft power can be up to 7 kW. This allows some reserve power by which the vehicle could climb at
approximately 0.3 m/s.
In terms of energy building blocks, the gearbox is considered to be an energy converter. This one can
increase the torque by almost the factor 4.

[You may, if you wish, submit this document as a backup showing your calculations of Q3, however, if your
survey submission is successful, the document submission is not necessary. Be sure your Submissions are
done before 13h20.]