Service - Electro-Mechanical System Mathematical Modeling
One of the services offered by BECS LLC is the creation of mathematical models of physical and mechanical systems. I have talked about math models previously, and they are super important to understanding how a given system works. One design philosophy that I have is to seek to have at least a near-complete understanding of the physics of the system before I start in on the problem-solving phase.
Take for instance a water pump on a reverse osmosis filtration system. Suddenly, a company finds pump failures at an increasing rate. The failures of the pump are multiple, such as front motor bearing breakdown, diaphragm fatigue, and/or motor brushes wearing out. However, when the pump was specified, it should have lasted the life of the overall filtration system. This is where the math model comes in to help gain understanding of how the system works.
In this theoretical case, the pump pulls RO permeate water (purified) out of the system and pushes it into a pressurized storage tank. The storage tank then pushes the water out through a blend valve and a pressure reducing valve and finally to where it would be used. To answer the question of how often the pump turns on and off, a cut in pressure to turn the pump on and cut off pressure to turn the pump off are needed as inputs. The tank size/capacity and pressure of the air bladder, and the actual demand for the water being used.
A demand curve per unit time is developed into steps. This demand curve will inform when the pressurized tank empties to the point where the pump cut in pressure is reached. What is interesting is that most do not realize that a 40-gallon storage tank only holds 12-15 gallons of usable water! Modeling this fact is important, and knowledge of the Ideal Gas Law and thermodynamic principles is needed. The model will determine average daily run time of the pump and answer the question why the pumps are failing fast. In this case, the useful running life of the pump was exceeded so as to fail in less than a year. The filtered water demand had increased by over 200% from the beginning.
My experience with producing models is diverse across engineering. Here are just some of what I have produced (besides the one I mentioned):
-Sizing of manufacturing components for demand (see US Patent US 11,796,969)
-Crow AMSAA for reliability growth of a machine fleet
-Gray water recovery and reuse system
-Accumulator sizing
-Reliability test planning based on desired confidence interval
-Non-Newtonian flow for pumping and dispensing
-Free convection cooling of different shaped containers
-Connecting rod stresses derived from a pneumatic compressor cycle
-Magnetic circuit modeling for torque transfer (see US Patent US 6,577,037)
-Coffee capsule aspect ratio to pressure differential (see US Patent US 10,543,977)
-Optical model to determine the size of coffee grinds (see US Patent US 12,127,713)
-And many more!
