Daming Gao
Engineering Design Portfolio
2013/11
Conceptual Design Report
Find solutions
Topic: Reduce Waste of Lotions and Liquid Soaps Sold in Containers with Pump Dispensers
On design phase, we received a problem statement from the other design team, and aimed to solve it by proposing at least four divergent solutions.
Below is the note I have taken: (in the colored boxes on the right, the
actual content of my note is included, as well as additional
comments.)
I applied reverse brainstorming technique to break down the problem into elements, then identified the causes. Our future design should prevent those causes.
Note: My initial analysis might not be correct, but it is the start to approach and truly understand the problem.
The pump dispenser can only remove a small portion of residual product because:
[1] Tube has limited diameter - only the product next to the tube can be removed;
[2] The tube is not mobile;
[3] The pressure of the pump is not sufficient.
I made two sketches which might be the potential solutions. The left one is a syringe acting as a soap/lotion collector. Note that the bottom part is a piece of rubber which fits the interior of container. The mechanisms are:
[1] Place the syringe inside the container;
[2] Since the rubber tightly fits to the interior of container, as we move the syringe downward, it sweeps the residue accumulated at the sides to the bottom.
[3] Then draw the product inside the syringe by pulling the plunger.
The right one reverses the direction of the container. We place the rubber connecting to a rod into the bottle. Notice it again tightly fits the interior. By pushing it downward, the product moves to the opening of the container more quickly.
I discussed the above ideas with my group members (For feedback) Then we put our concepts together and form several preliminary designs. Click to view the most representative designs.
(Note: See 2013/11, Figure 1)
My Contributions:
- Wrote the introduction, analysis & assessment of the design brief, part of the reframing section.
- Proposed the mobile dispenser solution (design III)
- Wrote part of the "Design Selection Process" section.
- The formatting of the whole document .
After rounds of brainstorming and group feedback, we selected and integrated the best design features. Eventually five divergent solutions were generated and we started considering the details (e.g. how each component works, and how to describe its functions using clear language)
In the meantime, we did some moderate reframing to the problem statement so that it became a better tool to evaluate the performance of each design. In this particular case, we added a few constraints and defined each criteria to more detail. Sometimes we wanted to know how well the design performs in terms of a certain aspect (e.g. the amount of time taken to remove the residual product) but the brief did not state that explicitly, as a result we included that as a new criterion.
Finally, we applied the standard selection tools such as Pugh Chart and Pairwise Comparison Matrix and one design was selected based on the result.
Figure 1: Corresponding Design Phases