Novel Industrial Application - Reversed Engineering Worksheet

Do you think your product, building, or system would work if manufactured?

The modified I-beam has a similar cost with the commercial I-beam that gives better mechanical performance in terms of fatigue loading. Apart from that, it requires least modification to the current manufacturing process. Therefore, I think modified I-beam will work pretty well if manufactured and sell into the market. 

Do you think that you could raise funds to pay for manufacturing? How would you go about raising funds?

I think this ideal will attract a lot of interest from people working in the construction industry. I will prepare a proposal and submit to the respective company to ask for their collaboration on this project. Apart from that, I can also upload my work onto the fund raising website to ask for donation from the public or potential investor.  

Do you think that many engineers explore solutions from nature into their inventions?

I think many engineers adapt solution from the nature into their work nowadays. The solutions found from the nature is environmentally friendly and able to interlink with other system to form a ecosystem-alike working environment which helps to save cost and reduce shutdown frequency. 

Novel Industrial application - Modified I-beam

I-beam, also known as Universal Beam (UB), is a I-shaped beam that commonly used in the construction industry as support element. It is consists of a horizontal flange ("I" shape) and a vertical "web" element. The flange is design to resist bending momentum while the web is designed to resist shear forces. I-beam is commonly made of mild steel that behave follow the Beam theory. The I-beam design is evaluated in terms of its stiffness, yield stress, bending failure, and shear failure. The design of I-beam is governed by the ASTM standards (For example: ASTM A9992).   

In Figure 1, a computational simulation was carried out to evaluate the performance of commercial I-beam and modified I-beam. The two major evaluation criteria for the I-beam are governed by Von Mises Stress and displacement rate. Von Mises Stress determine the mechanical failure of a material by checking the yield stress of the material. The mechanical design is said to fail if the maximum Von Mises Stress induced on the material is higher than the yield strength of the material. The concept of Von Mises Stress is governed by distortion energy failure theory while failure occur when distortion energy in actual case is greater than distortion energy in simple tension case. In the simulation, the selected material is alloy steel with a Yong's Modulus of 2.1E11 N/m2 and Yield Strength of 6.2E8 N/m2. Refer to (a) and (b) from Figure 1, the maximum value of Von Mises Stress is fixed at the end of the center plate with a value of 2.2E8 N/m2 and 6.2E8 N/m2 for commercial and modified I-beam , respectively. Both design have maximum Von Mises Stress value lower than the yield point value of alloy steel, thus the design is consider safe. The simulation result is in agree with other literature which showed that rigid material has higher loading resistance than complex (rigid-flexible-rigid) material. From (c) and (d) from Figure 1, the maximum displacement rate for commercial and modified I-beam are 4.92E3 mm and 1.07E2 mm, respectively. The results showed that modified-I beam has greater flexibility which is able tolerate longer cyclic loading. 

Steel beam is widely used for bridges and industrial buildings. In the design of bridge, the shear studs are increase with a steadily rising number of high-cycle loading which lead to fatigue failure during the lifetime of the structure. By adapting the complex structure from turtle shell, it can increase the lifetime of steel beam which is able to improve its loading resistance and fatigue resistance from the steel beam structure.           

(a)

                                                                                (b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 1. The mechanical performance of normal and modified-I beam based on SimulationExpress. (a) and (b) showed the Von Mises Stress from commercial and modified I-beam, (c) and (d) showed the displacement rate from commercial and modified I-beam

References
1. "What is Von Mises Stress", Learnengineering.org, 2016. [Online]. Available: http://www.learnengineering.org/2012/12/what-is-von-mises-stress.html. [Accessed: 04- Jul- 2016].

Component of innovative I-beam

The modified I-beam has been shown in Figure 1. Refer to the figure, it shows that the modified I-beam is divided in to three parts with a circular rod at the center. The modified I-beam is mimicking the mechanical structure of carapace. The carapace arrange in the form of rib-suture-rib where rib is connected to the flexible suture sites. As you can see, the rigid alloy steel plate is separated by a silicon rubber rod at the center. Silicon rubber is chose as the major material to construct the rod to mimic the suture-alike structure with a similar flexibility and impact resistance in terms of this Yong's Modulus and Yield Strength. In addition, silicon also make the I-beam more resistant toward fatigue loading which expand the lifetime of the I-beam. This modified I-beam adapt the biological concept from turtle shell with a relatively low cost to manufacture. Further studies on the application of modified I-beam and the mechanical performance of I-beam can be found the the following posts.
Stay Tune !!!!!

Figure 1. 3-dimensional view of the modified wide-flange (W) shape I-beam. 

Figure 2. A actual view of commercial wide-flange (W) shape I-beam that designed according to ASTM standard