Bracket Design Project
FEA Practicum
The objective of this project was to design a sheetmetal bracket to support an upward load of 1500N applied by a rod and nut, such that I = P/(C*M) was maximized, where C was the cost and M was the number of manufacturing operations. The bracket would fail if it experienced a severe mechanical failure or deformed substantially.
The bracket was designed in NX 8.0 and FEA was conducted in NX Nastran. The final design was built by hand out of 1018 steel sheetmetal. In final testing, the bracket failed at 2700N due to a buckling failure in an assembly bolt. The performance index of the bracket was calculated as 7.915, a very good result. The initial bracket was over-engineered and a design revision would involve the use of thinner sheet metal, drilling holes in the main load arm, and thinning the mid-section of the support arms. The original FEA results showed this was possible without compromising the minimum loading capacity of the bracket.