Design Competition 2021: Climbing Stacker
In 2021, approximately 90 teams of approximately 6 first-year Mechanical Engineering students will be challenged to compete with each other to design a mechanical tube stacker that can stack tubes vertically from above. The 'Climbing Stacker' had to climb up a tube under its own power, take a tube and stack it on top of the already standing tube.
The design should be able to help with, for example, the efficient realization of increasingly larger wind turbines. The limit of rotor blades with a length of 100 meters has now been passed; in the coming years it will be about scaling up to rotor blades up to 120 meters in length (source). By only scaling up geometrically, the rotor blades would become much too heavy. Every meter more requires a lot of research and calculations. New materials, constructions and building methods are being developed for this. Building these high turbines also requires increasingly larger cranes, which is becoming logistically complex and disproportionately expensive. For these reasons, turbine manufacturers are looking for other, innovative ways of high-altitude assembly.
From February to June, the students worked on their own design and production of a Climbing Stacker. During the design competition on June 16, 2021, it became clear which designs delivered the best performance.