STUDENT COMPETITION: VISION FOR ENGINEERING AND INFRASTRUCTURE
Trebuchet 2005
University of Maine
A team of six University of Maine junior engineering students will design and build a catapult for international competition. My role is
to design and model the catapult using
MicroStation V8.
I used the latest version, MicroStation V8
2004 Edition, in order to experiment with the
new 3D PDF creator.
Guidelines for the catapult design governed
weight, creation of force, projectile size, and
material profiles. Material profiles were chosen from a stock manual provided by the
manufacturer. I then drafted a set of material
profiles that I could use, and extruded them
to the lengths needed.
composite materials. A system of pulleys and cables redirected the force
produced by the
springs into downward force applied
at the end of the
arm. For the projectile, I drafted a
sphere of the correct dimensions,
placed it onto the
trough, and made
supports. Finally, to
calculate weight I
used the material properties found in the
manual and multiplied the density of the
material by the volume of the profiles I had
drawn. Because of the weight limit, I had to
adjust the structure several times to reduce
the weight of the members, while making
careful calculations so that the structure
would not be weakened.
I am now in the process of using sheet files
and pen tables to create construction documents for the building process. ;
To create the force needed to throw the projectile, I developed a set of leaf springs. For
the competition, we created springs from
STUDENT COMPETITION: VISION FOR ENGINEERING AND INFRASTRUCTURE
Integrating GIS and data
Stuttgart University of
Applied Sciences
other users of MicroStation to create points,
lines, and areas, including tagged data for
query.
The completed file can be opened in
MicroStation GeoGraphics for topological
cleanup and validation, feature inclusion, and
GIS management.
The aim of the project is to create a campus
map by extracting features from an
orthophoto and combining them with features obtained from GPS data. An existing
orthophoto in GeoTIFF format was used. The
orthophoto is given in a geographic coordinate system with Datum in EPSG6326 and
Spheroid in EPSG7030. Existing trees, bushes
and fountains were captured using a real-time
kinematic GPS receiver and the captured
data were given in WGS84 ASCII format. The
orthophoto and the GPS data were imported
into MicroStation GeoGraphics and saved as
a DGN file.
After importing the orthophoto and GPS data
into MicroStation GeoGraphics, the file was
opened in MicroStation. This allows multiple
users to do different parts of the digitization.
This demonstrates the power of MicroStation
and its GeoGraphics software. With these
tools, one need not worry about map and
geographic projections. ;
MicroStation GeoGraphics allows seamless
integration of GIS and CAD on a single platform. Furthermore, different map projections
can be combined into a single file. This allows
