Supermileage Vehicle Drivetrain Design

The current Cal Poly Supermileage team has faced issues regarding the efficiency and durability of their SMV vehicle’s drivetrain. After conducting research to solve their current issues, we developed a final drivetrain configuration that will improve the performance and life of the vehicle. This report outlines some of the completed research including: a table of designs used by other teams, a table of patents that can be applied to our design, and a list of technical literature we can use to better our design. It also summarizes our goals and objectives, including a table of the engineering specifications of the drivetrain along with their target requirements and how we plan to achieve these targets. Also included, is the process we took to choose our final design starting with multiple different concepts and how we picked them, narrowing down the concepts to the best one by means of research and a decision matrix, choosing our final design, and analysis and risk factors. Based on this, we have chosen a single reduction chain driven drivetrain, very similar to the previous design, as our final design because it can result in the best efficiency while still being compatible with the other components of the drivetrain. We have decided to focus design on the rear hub and sprocket since they were the major factors in low efficiency and damage for the previous vehicle. We reverse engineered a hub as a base for our purpose-built hub, and we designed a new sprocket and axle. In this report, we cover how we produced the final design, manufactured the components, and tested design specifications to prove the viability of the design. Finally, future improvements and recommendations to improve the design for future iterations

Subgroup-specific alternative splicing in medulloblastoma

Medulloblastoma is comprised of four distinct molecular variants: WNT, SHH, Group 3, and Group 4. We analyzed alternative splicing usage in 14 normal cerebellar samples and 103 medulloblastomas of known subgroup. Medulloblastoma samples have a statistically significant increase in alternative splicing as compared to normal fetal cerebella (2.3-times; P<6.47E-8). Splicing patterns are distinct and specific between molecular subgroups. Unsupervised hierarchical clustering of alternative splicing events accurately assigns medulloblastomas to their correct subgroup. Subgroup-specific splicing and alternative promoter usage was most prevalent in Group 3 (19.4%) and SHH (16.2%) medulloblastomas, while observed less frequently in WNT (3.2%), and Group 4 (9.3%) tumors. Functional annotation of alternatively spliced genes reveals over-representation of genes important for neuronal development. Alternative splicing events in medulloblastoma may be regulated in part by the correlative expression of antisense transcripts, suggesting a possible mechanism affecting subgroup specific alternative splicing. Our results identify additional candidate markers for medulloblastoma subgroup affiliation, further support the existence of distinct subgroups of the disease, and demonstrate an additional level of transcriptional heterogeneity between medulloblastoma subgroups