• The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, “Science Storms”

    In March 2010, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry opened the single largest interactive exhibit in the museum’s history. Science Storms allows museum patrons to access chemistry and physics through dramatic natural phenomena inside the Museum. To date, the Science Storms Exhibit has been honored with nearly twenty prestigious awards, including a THEA Award for Outstanding Achievement from the Themed Entertainment Association and two MUSE awards from the American Association of Museums and has hosted an estimated 100,000 visitors a month.

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  • Guest Retention System for a Ride

    A major theme park owner was concerned that guests in a low-speed boat ride might be tempted to get out of the boat during the ride and potentially enter unsafe areas within the attraction. That concern drove a new requirement that the boats be equipped with a guest retention system. Since most of the rest of the ride elements were designed (and in some cases installed) when this new requirement surfaced, the new system had to meet aggressive weight and schedule targets while minimizing any impact to other ride systems that were already designed or built.

    CAD Model of Assembly

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  • Boat Ride Guide Wheel

    Most theme park boat rides employ a series of lateral wheels on each side of the boat. These wheels perform the following functions:

     

    • Provide lateral guidance in the flume. For this function, the wheels should be relatively soft and have a large stroke to minimize the impact loads to the passengers as the boar bumps around the serpentine trough. However, they should not absorb too much energy, as that would slow the boat too much.
    • Center the boat in the load/unload areas and other control points. For this function, relatively stiff wheels are desired to minimize the tolerances on the gap between the station platform and the boat.
    • Absorb the loads generated when a backup occurs and boats collide. When this happens, the boats tend to “jack knife” and large lateral loads are imparted when a moving boat impacts a string of stationary boats. For this case, the wheels need to absorb very high loads without failing.

     

    Boad Ride Guide Wheel

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  • Direct-Drive Utility-Scale Wind Turbine

    TWT led a consortium to design a 3 MW direct-drive turbine in 2009. Using a number of advanced technologies, this turbine was predicted to deliver a 10% reduction in cost of energy compared to a conventional turbine of the same rating. Much of that improvement was the result of significant reductions in operations and maintenance costs, as well as a unique generator architecture.

    The turbine featured a 300-foot rotor diameter and a 340-foot tall tower.

    TWT executed the mechanical design of the turbine, performed feasibility-level structural and dynamic analyses, wrote the business plan for development and deployment of the turbine, wrote a proposal to ARPA-E, and participated in funding presentations to venture capitalists.

    Direct Drive Turbine