After a few meetings in and out of the lab we decided that we are going to work on the drying process in two steps. The first step will be a bulk drying where we roughly process the wet clothing and get rid of the bulk of the water. The second step is going to involve a more precise drying. After this step the clothing should be pretty much ready to be worn. We came up with a lot of different ways that we could use for both steps. We put the different ideas in a Concept tree to make it easier for use to decide which one to use. Some ideas for the second step of the drying process are using solar heat to create a greenhouse effect, to make use of the heat of camp fire that is often available, vacuuming the clothing to decrease the boiling point of the water and in this way vaporize the water to dry clothes and spinning the clothing fast enough to make it dry.
Here are some existing ideas that were used by other engineers or designers:
This design is similar to the spin drying design that we were thinking about. It is connected to the bicycle and human powered.
This Video Shows the mechanism that our team is planning on designing for the first stage of the drying process, drying the bulk of the water. Even though it does not really serve the same purpose on this video, it is not really different from our proposed idea.
This week we finished the concept chart, which lists the different ways we could potentially dry clothes.We also met with Professor Hearn. She provided us with valuable information regarding the conditions of the island. She also gave us the specifications for the generators they have on the island as well as the budget for the project. We found out that they have two Honda EU1000i generators and one Honda EU2000i generators. One idea we came up was to use the exhaust heat form the generators to heat the clothing. Professor Hearn also said we have a budget of about a thousand dollars. Professor Hearn gave us added motivation to dry the clothing by telling us about the Mango Flies (see Picture 1) which are attracted to moisture and will lay their eggs under peoples skin if they have wet clothing on. Another idea we had this week was to have a metal pipe go into the camp fire which could conduct heat and warm the clothing. Overall it was a very productive week. We also did more research on the Island and its conditions. The YouTube video below shows the island of Bioko from above. This week we hope to decide on which proposal to pursue to the design stage.
Bioko Island Equatorial Guinea - The Island of Bioko lies in the Gulf of Guinea. This video shows the island view from an airplane or helicopter(a helicopter is more likely).
In the first week of lab we established our group and chose our project. The project we chose to engineer is a device that will be able to dry clothes in the Bioko Island region of Equatorial New Guinea. The client is Professor Gallagher and the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program. The problem is that it is so humid and damp in this region that clothes don't dry well which leads to discomfort and rashes caused by mango flies. We are looking to develop a way of drying the clothing without using electricity. Some ideas we had were to create a way to squeeze the liquid out of the clothing or to create friction and heat that will dry the clothing. Another idea was to use or design a solar oven to dry the clothes. The design has to be simple so it can be implemented in the remote camps. So far we are just in the brainstorming process of possible designs to dry the clothes. We also plan to research possible devices that are used in other parts of the world to dry clothing and possibly implement some of their design proponents into ours. Our goal is to narrow down our ideas step by step and to design a prototype.
Picture 1 - A rain forest with similar environmental conditions to Bioko Island.
Picture 2 - The location of Bioko Island is shown by the arrow.
