The purpose of this project was to design a bench test for the Varistart system.

These strange gearing shapes may strike a question: How do they even rotate without breaking and what do we do with them ?

Without going too far in mechanical analytic, we can say that when the system start , the overall torque in enormous with a small speed (hence easy to rotate) and at the end of the revolution of the blue gearing (above), the torque reduces dramatically and provides a large speed (hence fast after the start). This ingeniously named system “ Varistart ” indicate that the torque vary at the start of the system.

We divided this project in 3 parts:

CAD design of the gears and the bench in which these sat

• We proceeded to design these gearing on Catia CAD and run mechanical simulation and mechanical resistance study in order to obtain a product able to pass our specifications. 

Design of the electronic system used for data acquisition

• We designed a Electronic system needed to acquire the position/speed/acceleration and torque of the system in order to classify its performances. For this design we used Arduino, which was my introduction to embedded systems

 Implementation/manufacture of the whole system

• We used the heavy duty manufacturing machines available in our school to implement the system and test it

Results : We did a complete mechanical study of the performance of Varistart which were later used to design several prototypes by the IP owner of this system.