Design Competition Mechanical Engineering 2021

16 June 2021 08:00 till 17:00 | Add to my calendar

About 88 teams of about 6 first-year Mechanical Engineering students are challenged to compete with each other to design a mechanical pipe stacker that can stack pipes vertically on top of each other. The "Climbing Stacker" must climb up a pipe under its own power, take a pipe and stack it on top of the pipe already standing.

The design should help in the efficient realization of ever-larger wind turbines. The limit of 100 meter long rotor blades has now been passed; in the coming years it will be about scaling up to rotor blades up to 120 meters in length (source). Only geometrically scaling up would make the rotor blades much too heavy. Every meter more requires a lot of research and calculations. New materials, constructions and construction methods are being developed for this. To build these high turbines, ever larger cranes are also needed, which is logistically complex and disproportionately expensive. For these reasons, turbine manufacturers are looking for other innovative ways of high-altitude assembly.

Read more about the Design Competition 2021