This is one the most exciting projects I’ve worked on throughout my college career. It was sponsored by the Volvo Construction Equipment Company, Sweden. I got to work with an excellent group of seven students out of which four students were from Pennsylvania State University and the other three from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. This project was my senior year capstone project design project. 
The purpose of this project was to provide Volvo with the necessary information regarding additive manufacturing as a potential manufacturing method. This project analyzed whether it is possible for Volvo to manufacture the control unit for the PT9 transmission with additive manufacturing. Additionally, this project served as a basis for Volvo to evaluate the possibilities to utilize additive manufacturing as their means of production for their control unit in the future. The aim of the project was to redesign the transmission unit so that it will have a an equal or improved performance and be economical. This redesigned component should be able to withstand the environmental conditions that are applied to the existing component. Furthermore, the design should be unique and be able to be patented if Volvo wishes to do so. I cannot include the picture of the PT9 Transmission due the non-disclosed agreement our team had to sign during the start of the project.
Responsibilities:
Volvo wanted us to reduce the number of parts on their existing system, come up with concepts that will improve the design and perform computational fluid dynamics on the existing system and the newly developed concepts. Due to complexity of the project, our work was divided between structural and the internal analysis of the component. Here at Penn State we had the resources to carry out the internal analysis of the system as my team was skilled with SolidWork’s computational fluid dynamics. The students from Chalmers University took the responsibility of the structural analysis.
Results:
We combined the structural and internal concepts to make a hybrid model for Volvo. This model has a reduced number of parts and a simpler internal canal geometry than the existing one. We presented our final design to our sponsors back in Sweden and they were extremely impressed by our work. Now as a team we hope the design gets patented. The image below shows our final design of the model.
