Water Tower
In my Mechanical Engineering Design Laboratory course we built water towers. The goal was to push a block to the other side of a pond in a competition (see below). We had to build the tower so it could be assembled in pieces and support a 5 gallon bucket. We started by doing a buckling analysis to understand how long the dowels should be and concluded that 25cm was a safe length to support the weight of the bucket. To design the truss system, we did an FEA analysis on several designs and decided to design the tower so it had asymmetric loading. The tower is comprised of six 25cm tall blocks which are connected through 3D printed joints. We attached strings to the tower so if the tower buckled, it could still stay upright in the competition.
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We also did a lot of experimentation and analysis regarding pumping the water from the floor to the top bucket and then draining the bucket through a long tube. We machined a custom aluminum nozzle for our tower so the water could drain from the bucket and exit at a higher velocity, increasing the force we could generate in the competition. Our water tower was very successful and placed 3rd in the competition in a pool of over 20 teams.
