Engine Design Mechanical Engineering Senior Capstone

As part of my mechanical engineering degree, this past semester I completed a senior capstone in which my team of 9 designed a novel motorcycle engine entirely from the ground up in a 16-week timeframe. The project was structured such that our team role-played as an engine design firm subcontracted by a larger motorcycle manufacturer who had requested a design that could reach 12,000 units of production in three years. As such we not only had to design a functional engine, but also had to work as a real engineering team within the context of a larger organization to meet its corporate goals.

This included: generating derived requirements from the list of customer requirements we were given, performing market and standards research to appropriately select an engine type, weighing various design decisions against the customer’s desired features and production targets, performing manufacturing assessments, generating total cost estimates & profit margin targets, and ensuring that our engine was both sellable from a regulatory perspective and targeted a viable market segment. Based on market research we ultimately decided to design an engine for a long-distance touring bike, prioritizing torque output, competitive fuel efficiency, and a low total cost. Additionally, to better simulate the experience of being a real engineering team, the project was broken into a Project Planning phase, Conceptual Design phase, and Detailed Design phase. After the conclusion of each phase our group gave lengthy oral presentations to simulate project reviews from unit executives.

As the group’s project manager, my role included both team management and engineering responsibilities. On the management end I was in charge of allocating manpower, generating our Gantt chart and drafting much of our team charter, driving group meetings, conducting initial market & standards research, taking point on our weekly progress reports and three major oral presentations, and picking up any slack to ensure that we hit our key timeline & critical path milestones. On the engineering side I took on a number of tasks, including designing the engine’s crankshaft, crankcase, and flywheel in CAD, emissions analysis, laying out the system level design for the engine’s lubrication, balancing the engine, and conducting the teams stress and fatigue analysis on critical components using Solidworks finite element analysis.

All of this work culminated in the PH15, an air cooled, 1.5 liter, 90-degree V-twin with a 7312 RPM redline, capable of producing 60 horsepower and 100 ft-lbs. of torque. I’m proud to say that we received an A on the project. We met or exceeded all of our customer derived requirements, adhered to California emissions and noise standards, and met our market viability targets of competitive torque & fuel efficiency along with a relatively low cost of roughly $3700.

Our full final report featuring all of our analysis including Matlab code, project management tools, and orthographic drawings of each component is available for viewing or download in PDF format from Google Drive here:

EMAE 360 final report