The Concept Screening and Scoring matrix that allowed Team D an easy way to judge the stability, blockage, maintenance, durability, and safety of each of the designs created by the team. To decide what would have been tested, the team choose which parts of each design are sound and should be used in the final design. Team D chose to use the predetermined criterion to judge the designs to create the most accurate comparison to the sample AEV.
Criterion Used:
Stability: Stability is defined as the craft’s ability to hang straight down from the track. If the craft hangs too far to one side, it can create unnecessary friction and slow the craft down.
Minimal Blockage: Minimal blockage is defined by the aerodynamics of the craft. The better the aerodynamics, the more easily the craft can commute through the air. This helps with power consumption and speed of the craft.
Maintenance: Maintenance is defined as how easy the internal parts of the craft are able to be replaced. Since the team went with a “sandwich” design for each design tested, our team wanted to ensure that there were no problems gaining access to internals
Durability: Durability is defined as the craft’s ability to hold up to external forces. This is especially important because the craft needs to be transported from home to school, and can easily be damaged in the process.
Safety: Safety is defined as the overall ability of the craft to hold up in the event of a crash and not burst into flame, or harm someone nearby in the process. This is always the primary focus of our group and thus is one of the more important conditions.
The first way the team evaluated our designs was with a screening matrix. This matrix compares the control craft to the other craft, determining only if the craft are better, just as good, or worse. This matrix is useful for being able to tell how to score the designs in the next section, which is the scoring matrix.
As the name implies, the concept scoring matrix ranks each design as compared to the control using a score of 1 to 5. After scoring this, the score is then run through a weighting equation to ensure what is important on the craft is what will get the most points. Using the screening matrix, Team D determined if the craft was the same, better, or worse than the control and assigned values based off of the results.
After evaluating both the screening and scoring matrices, the team determined that the best designs to move on to the Advanced Research & Development were the ones that the group had originally anticipated would perform well. These designs were Jon and Caleb’s final designs.