Freefall Impacts and Reliability Engineering at Oculus

This unit will give a hands-on example of how kinematics and mechanical analysis applies to the work done by the Failure Analysis/Reliability Engineering team at Oculus. Students will learn about the goals of the Reliability Team and tools they use to accomplish their goal. Based on available equipment, students will perform one of two hands on labs focused on collecting accelerometer data. Students will be asked to predict what an acceleration versus time graph will look like for various scenarios and also explain the motion of an object for an acceleration versus time graph that is given to them. Students will verify their predictions by the hands on collection of data and resolve discrepancies between prediction and experiment. This unit serves as a bridge between kinematics and mechanics and functions as an opportunity for students to explore Newton’s 2nd law using data.