JCATI Carbon Recycler

Jcati Project Report

Introduction

The JCATI project addresses the issue of carbon fiber recycling. The recycling of carbon fiber currently is an expensive and hard process. As the use of carbon fiber increases as dose the demand for recycling the material. The JCATI project involves designing a machine to cut and crush the recycled wing trimmings from Boeing airplanes and baking them to perform pyrolysis to get back to raw carbon fiber. Engineering will be applied to the JCATI project to redesign and improve the machine already made by previous Engineers.

Figure 1.2 - Crusher Housing and Wheels

Crusher Wheels Housing Assembled

Design Sketches

Initial Design 2

Figure 2.2 Initial Design 2

Initial Design 1

Initial Design 3

Figure 2.1 Initial Design 1

Figure 2.3 Initial Design 3

Figure R1: Feed Rate Graph

Results

Table R1: Gear Backlash

Table R2: Housing Deflection

The feed rate results reinforced the calculation in Analysis 14 and fed at an average rate 1.0458 feet per minute. The major design requirement that was tested was the housing deflection as it was calculated to deflect .01 inches under the 9,000-pound load. It was required to deflect less than 1/16th of an inch and produced an average deflection of .0073 inches which was well within spec for the machine. Overall, the crusher design was a great success and solved the issues from the prior year's machine. But once the machine was made more rigid other problems surfaced that were not initially predicted like the bending of the crushing teeth. The machine worked as designed overall though and is ready to produce recycled carbon fiber.

Figure 1.2 - Crusher Housing and Wheels

Figure 1.2 Crusher Housing and Wheels

CONTACT ME

Central Washington University, East University Way, Ellensburg, WA, USA

rileydev@cwu.edu

Devin Riley