As a Ride Design Team Captain within Gator Theme Park Engineering and Design, I led a team of 30 in a one semester design Sprint and prototype of a rotating flat ride. The goal was to design a flat ride with a rotating base that rotated all ride vehicles at once, allow each rider to control their vehicles individual vertical movement, and to allow the riders to rotate along the axis of the arm holding the ride vehicle.
The intent of the design sprint was to quickly brainstorm ideas on how to create each mechanical system within the overall ride. Due to the short length of the project, the sprint was shortened into three parts: (1) preliminary concept generation, (2) concept sketching, and (3) design selection. A more detailed overview of a typical design sprint I led can be found in the Roller Coaster Restraint Project.
Once the sprint was complete, I lead the mechanical team in designing and modeling the mechanical systems of the ride. This project really showed the difficulties of scaling a complicated system down to a smaller model. To overcome this, certain components looked and worked different in the model than they would in a full-scale version of the ride. One example of this is that in a full-scale version of this ride, hydraulic actuators would be connected in the middle of the vehicle arms to lift and lower the vehicles vertically. Due to the small scale our model, servo motors were placed within the rotating base of the ride to lift and lower the arms. Another example is forgoing a controlled spin around the axis of the arm in the model due to the limited space at the end of the arms.
This project is ongoing. Next steps include completing the ride vehicle and manufacturing the model.