wao
3 degree of freedom amusement park ride for MIT Orientation
fall 2019
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Every year, my undergraduate dorm at MIT — East Campus — builds large wooden amusement park rides for all the freshmen to enjoy during orientation. In 2019, my sophomore year, three of my friends and I built a ride called Wao, which was a 2 degree-of-freedom spinning pendulum. The ride is made from a fixed wooden frame with roller bearings supporting a horizontal round shaft. Along that shaft, another roller bearing supports a vertical shaft with a carriage that sits and spins atop a tapered roller bearing.
Together, my friends and I designed the ride, inspired by similar rides we had seen in theme parks together. My role on the team was the doing structural analysis for the ride to make sure it was safe. Given that we wanted four riders, I calculated the static and dynamic loads on the entire structure to determine the right shafts, bearings, and wooden supports for the ride. Then I used finite element analysis in Solidworks to crosscheck the estimates.
For three weeks in August, we constructed the ride: cutting the wood, machining the shafts and metal plates, aligning the bearings and shafts, and drilling the whole carriage and frame together. We then ran and operated the ride for a few days during freshmen orientation.
I loved building and participating in this this ride so much that in my senior year 2021, I decided to lead all construction projects for orientation that year. Leading rush involved a lot of scheduling, finances, safety considerations, and design reviews. It was my first experience leading a large scale engineering project, and it was incredibly fun to guide my younger friends to implement their crazy design ideas thoroughly, beautifully, and effectively, as a team.
video of people riding!.mp4Page updated
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