Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: Civil/Mechanical/Manufacturing Engineering
Ciara Spence - Elizabeth City State University
The reverse engineering arm/3D scanner and 3D printer are very popular in many sectors of industry including military, NASA, healthcare, and education. The Society of Manufacturing Engineering (SME) defines reverse engineering as the process of taking a finished product and reconstructing design data in a format from which new parts or molds can be produced. The objective of this project is to utilize the reverse engineering process to scan and transform geometry of a part of airplane wing into a useful three-dimensional (3D) computer model platform that can be sent to a 3D printer and turned into actual physical part. Also, the computer model is converted to 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) model in order to perform stress analysis on it and validate reliability of the part in real word conditions. The process includes utilizing a laser Faro Arm scanner, Geomagic software, 3D Stratasys printer, and SolidWorks simulation software. The laser scanner and Geomagic software create a 3D computer model of the part which is used as the basic model to analyze it. In addition, the 3D printer is utilized to prototype the part for ensuring the manufacturability of the part early in the design phase. Finally, SolidWorks simulation software is used for performing stress analysis and make recommendations to improve the performance of the part. The data collected is used to determine how the part can properly handle the stresses when it encounters in the real world circumstances. Generating a computer numerical controlled (CNC) code by a PC-based computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) software is recommended for future work on this project. The CAD/CAM software allows importing CAD data, drawing geometry, and creating automated toolpath operations so that a CNC machine can manufacture the part.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): The author would like to thank the National Science Foundation- LSAMP program for supporting of this project.
Faculty Advisor: Akbar Eslami, aeslami@ecsu.edu
Role: I completed all parts of this research including scanning the part, generating the 3D CAD model, printing the parts using the 3D printer, and performing stress analysis.