Convertible High Heels-MCE 401/402 Capstone Project

Team : Nick DiFilippo, Kayla Morgan, Manuel Muller, Tabithia McLellan

MCE 401/402 was the capstone project for the Mechanical Engineering program at the University of Rhode Island. In this class, teams of four students were assembled and worked on a design project assigned to them for a full academic year. The project that I was assigned was to make a convertible high heel shoe. This would allow for women to convert their high heels from a flatter heel to a higher heel without the need to carry multiple pairs of shoes.



In the fall semester we were tasked with doing patent searches as well as creating concepts of the product. Every member of the team came up with multiple ways of connecting high heels to a shoe that consisted of snap-in, magnetic, screw, and twist and lock designs, amongst others. The final design that was selected is shown in the figure below. This design used a twist and lock mechanism. This final design also only allowed to the user to insert the heel into the shoe in a single orientation since one of the ridges on the heel was wider than the other two.



The Spring semester was mainly concerned with testing the design that was selected during the Fall. During this semester, my main focus was on designing a test fixture to measure the wear that would occur when the heel was inserted into the base and twisted to lock because there was no machine at URI that would simulate this movement.



A single test consisted of moving the linear piston forward (inserting the heel in the base), then rotating the piston clockwise (lock the heel), counterclockwise (unlock the heel), and then moving the linear piston backward (removing the heel from the base). The height of the locking mechanism was checked throughout the test which was 14,000 cycles. The pistons were controlled by two solenoid valves that were connected to a Blackwidow Arduino. The Blackwidow Arduino is an Arduino unit that has an integrated Wifi module. This Wifi module was run in Ad-hoc mode which allowed the Arduino to broadcast a network that a wireless device could connect to. Finally, an iPod App was created to act as the user interface



I was also in charge of designing fixtures that would be used to hole the high heel in place during the tension and compression tests that were performed. The machine used a double acting linear piston, and a double acting rotating piston. The linear acting piston was used to simulate taking out and inserting the high heel into the base of the heel and the rotating piston was used to simulate turning the heel to lock it into place. The fixtures frame was created from Aluminum so it could withstand the slamming of the pistons.



Our final product was mounted on a high heel shoe and modeled by one of our team members



Full Report