This project was completed for the Precision Machine Design course at Boston University. Our goal was to design a machine to cut and stack extruded aluminium pipes of a variety of lengths and diameters. In addition, this machine needed to be financially justifiable in order to replace the current method of 8 workers producing 800 pipes per hour.

I took ownership of the boxing motion system as well as putting all group members’ subassemblies together in SolidWorks. The boxing motion analysis included timing analysis to ensure functioning with the rest of the system, as well as linear drive and motor selection. From a Pugh chart analysis, the chosen method of movement were two ball-screw drives — one for moving the cut piece of off the conveyor to prevent friction against the still-extruding pipe, and to move the pipe over the box into the appropriate position. This allowed for the quick but also precise and gentle movement of the cut parts. Motor selection for the ball-screw drives was done with a 1.5x safety factor on the total torque requirement calculated.