Design and Analysis of an Acrylic Front of a Novel Mechanical Highway Billboard 2021-01-0832

Billboards are an effective instrument of advertisement at areas with high traffic flow such as alongside highways. They provide information to drivers for food, fuel, lodging, attractions, etc. A novel mechanical billboard has been conceived recently which contains rolling tubes to alternate as many as twelve printed signs. It has the advantages of both flexibility and cost-effectiveness. A container is built to protect the mechanism from the weather elements. To allow the displayed messages to be visible, a transparent acrylic front is installed. Due to its mechanical properties, it is a challenging task in designing a functional acrylic front. A reinforcement is selected to counter the weak flexural rigidity of the front during winds. On the other hand, the reinforced acrylic front must maintain sufficient visibility. In this study, a couple of conceptual designs are presented followed by the computer-aided engineering analysis regarding the strength, deformation and durability of the front under static, dynamic and fluid-solid-interaction (FSI) settings. A commercial finite element (FE) code is employed for modeling and numerical analysis. A few design issues related to mechanism as well as the results from numerical analysis are presented.