Michigan Tech Senior Capstone Design

At the beginning of my senior year, I was teamed up with four other Mechanical Engineering Seniors, and tasked with designing, building, and testing a thrust measurement system that measures forces and torques in all 3 axes.

This project gave us valuable experience in defining requirements, working within a budget, interacting with a customer, and engineering a system that will be used for research and potentially by future capstone teams testing their senior design projects.

Since we had to make six discrete measurements (three forces and three torques), we needed six sensors measuring force, in our case, load cells. These load cells were arranged in a way that the discrete component forces and torques could be calculated through linear algebra, solving a system of static equations.

In order to remove loads that were not in the measurement axis of the load cells, each load cell was mounted between rod end joints, creating two-force members which can't transmit torques.