Sol Flower
UIUC's junior-level design course (ME 370: Mechanical Design I) spends the semester learning about and applying concepts related to planar kinematics, machine dynamics, and structural design. Through this course, teams of students come together to design mechanisms targeted in a certain area or towards a particular task.
During the Spring 2020 semester, my ME 370 class was tasked with designing, building, and testing a hand-cranked, artistic kinetic sculpture which was intended to mark the passage of time. Prior to complications from the COVID-19 pandemic, these sculptures were intended to eventually join with a mechanical clock to create a fun, artistic, educational, and thought-provoking mechanism, similar to the purpose of a cuckoo clock.
While brainstorming for our kinetic sculpture, my team was inspired by the simple, artistic beauty of nature and decided to theme our mechanism based on the motion of a sunflower. Our sunflower design easily represents the passage of time through the opening and closing of the flower petals. We sought to emulate this motion, featuring a sunflower head as the base with rotating and expanding flower petals driven by a gear-cam mechanism. This allows the flower to appear to be growing with time as the sunflower is cranked from it’s dormant closed position to an outward open position. After an intermittent stop in the mechanism, the flower again returns to its closed, dormant position. This mimics a sunflower’s actual movement throughout the day as it opens up towards the sun and closes at night.
From this ideation process, my team designed and constructed a prototype, pitching our final sculpture as “Sol Flower.” The final prototyped mechanism utilized laser cut and 3D-printed components. Our sculpture utilizes four primary mechanisms: the intermittent gear, the crank-piston linkage, a rack and pinion, and the gear-cam mechanism. These mechanisms perform the following tasks:
- The intermittent gear controls the timing of the flower blossoming, as well as making each layer expand at different times. It is created using gears that have several teeth removed. When the teeth interlock, the flower blooms or collapses and when there is a gap in the teeth, the motion pauses momentarily.
- The crank piston is responsible for the forward-return motion of the flower. This mechanism makes the flower’s expansion and collapse possible.
- The rack and pinion transfers the linear motion of the piston into rotational motion which is further transmitted to the gear-cam mechanism.
- The gear-cam mechanism has two layers. The first layer is a straight slider that defines the motion and the angle of motion, while the second layer provides forces to drive that motion.
Our website portfolio from this project can be viewed here:
Teammates
Karen Karapetyan, Benjamin Mei, Juyi Zhang