The water reservoir is 1.8 inch deep, made for easy access by the pump, and is covered via a sealed acrylic plate. It uses the same idea clamping collar method of the pillow blocks to latch onto our tube. Since the reservoir part is handling a lot of load, including the water, its self-load, the fountain pots, and the gear pump, it was important to validate that the part could hold up against everything. We set up the FEA by fixturing the circular face of the reservoir, which isn't exactly true given that the reservoir position is variable and it is clamped to the tube. This is still a valid assumption to make, as we were trying to find the deformation of the part itself and not relative to the shaft. We used a distributed load across the entire water face.

The FEA results show stress concentrations primarily around the clamped circular face and sharp edges, where localized peaks are created due to the boundary condition. The maximum von Mises stress is high, but the rest of the water-facing surface experiences significantly lower stresses as the load is distributed uniformly. These high-stress regions are expected, given the constraint applied to the circular face. However, sharp transitions near the clamped face increased stress concentrations, which we reduced by adding fillets