Week 5 Post

Picture 1 - Beautiful Bioko Island

The fifth week was one of the most beneficial weeks among all the past five weeks. It involved a lot decision makings and a big leap towards, actually starting designing. We were in a condition where we had a lot of ideas and it was hard to decide on one specific idea. So, we classified all the methods we found useful and made a classification tree to show all the potential ways of drying clothes and to analyze their feasibility. We hope that the concept tree together with the decision matrix we made will help us to decide on which design to pursue. On the decision matrix we weighted the different needs as to how important they were to the design. To reach the decision matrix click this link. The outcome of the decision matrix shows that the best design is our conductive heater that transfers the heat from the fire to a chamber that contains the clothes and dries them. We are also designing a device that we can roll the clothes through  and will squeeze the majority of the water out (see video on week 4 post). As we said before (in week 4) there are two stages to our project, this device will be used in the first stage of the drying process. We also spent some time reworking our project overview. In the upcoming week we plan to make an AutoCAD/ProENGINEER design of our device.

Picture 1 was taken from the website http://bigblue1840-1940.blogspot.com/2011_11_01_archive.html