Our A+ Like Passion Project
Behold our compressed air 1-cylinder engine was created by a recycled bottles and parts and 3D printed materials. My partner and I have had an interest in engines for quite some time and wondered if we could make some kind of engine out of the things, we had access to too. Which resulted in us producing the idea of making this engine.
For our engine we used custom made pieces from the 3D printer along with other little pieces like recycled old fuel lines to direct the compressed air and a recycled clear tube as our cylinder to support the piston along with many other specialized pieces.
Beginning:
We were struggling to find a project idea but found a video on YouTube about a compressed engine and we were immediately intrigued but the only challenge was that we had to design/find our own parts.
My partner and I it have always had an interest in engines and understanding how things work, and not only did we figure out how our engine worked we also got to build it from scratch using our minds and the tools and materials that we had access to too using a good ole program called STEAM to support our idea.
Middle:
During the process of printing the parts we had many problems and challenges. With things like strength, sizing and going off of drawings made it hard. The part we had the most trouble with is the crankshaft, we printed it over 10 times and it was a big pain in the butt because either it wasn’t big enough, strong enough or just too rough or smooth. Since this piece was the most important part, we had to make sure it was perfect. But in the end the building of the engine came out successful we just had to worry about it actually working now.
End:
During the end I unfortunately had to miss the fair but according to my partner Aikiam it went really well people seemed interested in its mechanics and all the information on how the engine worked. But in the end after tons of struggle our engine did work and it did its job but the only thing that went wrong is that it wasn’t able to portably work by the plastic 2L bottle, but it did work when I plugged it into an air compressor and those RPM’s were fast and high!
End project result:
This was our final layout for our poster board this photo was taken right before the STEAM fair!
Final Engine Design:
This was the final design of our 3D printed compressed air engine this photo was taken right before its last testing.
What We Learned and What will we do to Improve it:
During the process of making the project we had lots of fun creating/learning about the engine in terms of figuring out how 1 cylinder air compressed engines can work and along with finding makeshift solutions for our biggest problems in order to make it work.
There’s a lot of things that could be improved on like making it out of a stronger material or having better ball bearings to improve efficiency on the crank output.
What I did:
To manage the work load and make it fair I focused on building/assembling the engine along with doing majority of the writing for the poster board. I ended up doing more for our main project so I could level out the workload between us because I wasn’t able to make it to the STEAM fair and Aikiam would be the only person there presenting which was a lot of work in terms of rehearsing.