design competition
july 17, 10am-12pm
Team 1: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer
Presenters: Danny Zhao, Hongrong Zhang, Chuxin Xiao, Zhijie Liu, and Huarui Hu
An energy recovery clothes dryer has been designed by our team for VANT151 project. It is a scaled-down prototype clothes dryer that has a 0.5L capacity and is powered by 24VAC 40VA. An alphanumeric LCD on its top panel is used to display the user interface, which provides several options to set the desired drying time, temperature and dryness with 5-button navigation pad beside the LCD screen. The fan and heater inside the dryer prototype were taken from a hair dryer. Other inner components such as the air duct and heat exchange outlet were all made by the 3D printing machine.
Team 2: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Heat Exchanger Outlet
Presenters: Christina Huang, George Song, Steven Yang, Justin Wang, Mint Jin, and Hyun Lee
The Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer (ERCD), differs from traditional clothes dryers which completely rely on electricity for power supply, is designed to be able to recover the energy produced by the heater and reuse this part of energy to dry the clothes, thereby saves energy and reduces electricity consumption.
The ERCD is not a realistic 1:1 scale machine. Instead, the ERCD we designed is a scaled-down prototype. The capacity is only set to be 0.5L with 24VAC 40VA power supply. Many designed features are worth mentioning. To set the drying time, inner temperature and degree of dryness, an LCD screen is installed on the top of the prototype. The screen is able to display a convenient user interface, operated by 5 buttons beside the screen. To simulate a real dryer with an adequate size, the fan and heater are disassembled from a hair dryer. 3D printing technique is used to fabricate the air duct, heat exchanger outlet, etc., and other parts to produce suitable components for the inner mechanism.
Team 3: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer
Presenters: Sohaib Qureshi, Yulin Shen, Hao Wang, Pengyu Cao, and Robbie Yang
The purpose of our project is to design an energy recovery dryer that can dry a small cotton handkerchief. Our main goal is to make a dryer that has high efficiency and low power consumption. However, there were certain constraints to the project. The dryer needs to be limited to the size 250 x 220 x 300 mm, power consumption cannot exceed 40 VA and the drum capacity should be at least 500 mL.
In order to achieve the goals within the provided constraints, many alternative designs were considered for the drum size, the user interface and the menu options. For the drum size, 3 different sizes were considered but after carefully examining all sizes the drum with a height of 10.3 cm and a diameter of 10 cm was chosen. To select the user interface, a pairwise chart was built to compare between the automatic, customized, last run and the specialised mode. The chart showed automatic and the customized mode as the best option.
Different menu options were also considered for the users such as temperature, dryness, strength, time and material. Accordingly, all the options were ranked which showed temperature, dryness and strength as the most suitable option for our design. In conclusion, our design for the dryer includes two options for the user interface, automatic and customized mode along with 3 options for the users to choose from which is the temperature, dryness and strength. Certain things still need to be designed like the tray for the condensed water and the heat sensor needs to be placed before the final working prototype can be built.
Team 4: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with High Efficiency of Heat Cycle
Presenters: Bill Zhu, Shang Gao, Aris Liu, Derrick Luo, and Yuyang Liu
Our team has designed and fabricated a scaled-down prototype of an Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer. This dryer is able to re-use the energy of exhausted air by making them flow through copper tubes, so the fresh cold air from outside will be warmed up by the exhausted air. The dryer has an LCD panel with five push buttons, and users can select auto-dry function or modify the various control settings. The entire size of the dryer is 250x220x300mm, and it includes a half-litre-sized drum.
Team 5: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer
Presenters: Runchao Yin, Gower Wang, Lucca Caputo, Omar Binfahad, and Hatem Baqi
The goal of the Enerec Dryer is to be a user friendly, practical, and most importantly, a sustainable dryer. To achieve that, a LCD screen is installed on the top of the dryer to let the user select the rotation speed of the drum, the target humidity and the temperature they want the dryer to reach. Then, when the dryer starts to operate, the fan in the dryer would turn on and air will flow through the heater then into the drum. After drying the clothes in the drum, the air will leave from the copper tubes. To make the dryer more energy efficient, the heater would turn off when the temperature reaches the pre-set value from the user. Then when the air leaves the dryer from the copper tubes, there would be an exchange of heat between the incoming air and the copper tubes. There are two major benefits due to this heat transfer. The first one is that the air that just got sucked in by the dryer would be heated up by the copper tubes and that would reduce the energy that it takes for the heater to heat up the air. The second benefit is to cool down the humid air in the tubes to condense the water in the air. Then, the dryer would collect that water for the user to utilize in other occasions and the air could be reused by the dryer. These features allow the dryer to be energy efficient and user friendly.
Team 6: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Easy Operation
Presenter(s): Yenong (Leo) Sun, Ziang (Oliver) Qiu, Huan (Bruce) Bian, Shuming (Barry) Xu, Jiawei (Kyle) Lin, Zicen (Jason) Yin
The project is to create an energy recovery clothes dryer in a period of two months. It involves several tasks from electrical wiring, Arduino coding and 3D mechanical design to physical assembling. The electrical wiring includes connecting different parts together such as power supply, LCD, fan, motor and heater on the breadboard. The coding is the core to achieve multi-functions: time, motor speed, temperature and humidity display on LCD and controlling mode and settings. The 3D design relies on a software - Solidworks where the drawing of components and the overall prototype of dryer are produced. Sometimes to fit the actual size, the actual assembling may be modified and adjusted from the preliminary design. One important feature of this dryer is its sustainability. It recycles the moist air after drying and condenses it to liquid phase. The heat released during condensation is used to warm the incoming air to continue the drying cycle. It saves both water resources and energy at the same time compared with traditional clothes dryer.
Team 7: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer With Variable Drum Speed
Presenters: Libo Yu, Zhengjie Hu, Yangtian Zhang, Zhuofei Lin, and Han Xu
The purpose for designing such an energy recovery clothes dryer is because of the high usage of electricity. Unlike the washing machine that does not have many features that could be improved, the dryer can use less energy once we recycle the air inside the chamber. This will make the dryer more electrically efficient, which lowers the cost for families and helps sustainable development.
During this project, our team’s goal is to design and build up a prototype of a energy recovery clothes dryer (EneRec Dryer). This clothes dryer recovers part of the energy in the air that exits the drum while the water carried by air will be collected in a water tray inside the dryer. This dryer is only a prototype that is scaled down, which is approximate 0.5L in volume.
This dryer equipped a liquid crystal display screen to allow the user access to the control menu and customise the drying duration and temperature. In addition, five buttons allow the user to choose different items under control menu.
The frame of the dryer is mainly aluminium sheets and extrusions, but the top panel would be plastic. The metal frame ensures the dryer have a longer life span although this is only a prototype design. In addition, the heater and wind blower are obtained from a hair dryer. The main part of the dryer is the drum, which can rotate during drying by connecting with a motor via a chain.
Team 8: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Audible Warning
Presenters: Yicong Ma, Simeng Li, Xiaojuan Mu, Hanyuan Zhou, and Vladimir Shevlyakov
The objective of this project is to design and fabricate the components and assemble a prototype of energy recovery dryer suitable for household use by July 11, 2018 with the materials provided by the instructor. The current energy efficiency of the dryer is low so this project will try to make a prototype of the clothes dryer that can improve the current energy efficiency. We considered alternative designs for drum size, user interface, water collection, placement of temperature and humidity sensor, the way to support the drum and the way to rotate the drum. Our final drum is 6.8 cm in height and its radius is 5 cm. The user interface includes 5 buttons and one liquid crystal display, which are at the left side of the top panel. The dryer has auto and manual operating modes. For the manual mode, the user can set desired drying time, temperature, the speed of rotation of the drum and dryness. When the drum starts to rotate and stops rotating, warning sound will be made. Our final design of the water collection is a tray with a semicircular handle. The sensor is placed on the air duct, where the hot humid air comes out from the drum. Four rollers will support the drum, and the belt will be used to rotate the drum.
Team 9: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer With Modular Design
Presenters: Charlie Lan, Colin Jin, David Zhao, and Jerry Feng
In this project, a clothes dryer prototype is built. The special feature of this prototype is a heating-cooling energy recovery element with no power-driven cooling component. Other features include a user interface made by 1 LCD screen and 5 buttons and a front-opening dryer door. Constraints of the project includes 40 VA maximum power usage, 1-hour maximum drying time, and a limited size of 250x220x300 mm. Project group consists of 4 members contributing mechanical, electronic, electrical, and documentation work. Alternative designs are discussed and the final design is chosen and built.
Team 10: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Remote Control
Presenters: Eric Ngo, Dudu Wu, Jianhong He, Luca Lu, and Tiffany Li
Recently, various types of clothes dryers with their own distinct attractive features have appeared on the market. In contrast, there are not many dryers that are particularly used for small size fabrics like handkerchiefs or cloths. As a part of VANT 151 project, our group would like to introduce a mini convenience dryer that is mobile and can be utilised everywhere.
The dryer can be divided into two parts: hardware and software. The basic hardware parts include a fan, a heater, a motor, a LCD display, 5 interface buttons and a remote sensor in which they are connected into a circuit with 2 Arduinos, 2 channel relay module by electronic components like wires, resistors, transistors, etc. The fan blows the heat into the drum while the motor rotates the drum forming a heating system. The role of the fan is also to pump the moist air outside the dryer. A program is loaded and executed on the Arduino to operate the heat - drum system in which it creates different dry modes. The dry modes comprise automatic and manual are displayed on the LCD screen so that users can either select their preference using the interface buttons or the remote sensor. The dryer has several special features such as remote control, fast input processing (button de-bounce), bidirectional drum rotation and cooling systems to smoothen fabrics.
Team 11: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Heart
Presenters: Alan Ni, Sally Song, Harvey Bai, Betty Wang, and Jorden Lou
Team 12: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer
Presenters: Wangxuejuan Yang, Mingjun Wang, Chunqi Zhan, Mingxia Yao, and Jingyi Xu
We have designed a scaled-down prototype of an Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer. The drum with the height of 70mm and diameter of 100mm were chosen. A thin tray with the height of 8mm was designed to collect condensed water from copper tube. The internal end of the tray is a semicircle with diameter of 40mm to make sure no leakage of water. To connect the motor with the drum, two pulleys are used to fasten the belt or the rubber band in order to effectively drive the drum. To fix the drum on the Air Duct, six rollers were installed on the Air Duct by screws to ensure the drum was fixed exactly and rotate freely. To fix Air Duct on the bottom panel, six foot-mounting brackets with two holes on each side of the right triangle were designed and installed on both sides of the Air Duct to stabilize it. The breadboard was placed on the bottom panel. The humidity sensor and temperature sensor, covered with protective plastic with breather holes, were fixed to the inner wall of the drum.
Team 13: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Emergency Reset System
Presenters: James Li, Joey Chan, Kay Wang, and Rose Xia
The purpose of the project is to build a scaled-down prototype of an energy recovery (EneRec Dryer) clothes dryer with size not exceeding 250x220x300 mm and at least 0.5L capacity. The requirement of this dryer is that the dryer should be able to dry a cotton handkerchief within an hour, and the maximum allowable power consumption should be 24 VAC, 40 VA. In our design, there is an emergency reset button on the top panel of the dryer. The function of this button is to reset the control system and stop the dryer when the dryer is in operation. The reason why this design was used is that safety is critical for the dryer. If the dryer is not working properly, the user can easily stop/reset the system without disconnecting the power source of the dryer.
Team 14: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Large Capacity Water Tray
Presenters: Yizhou (Harry) Shen, Jianyu (Bruce) Gu, Shuangyu (Saki) Wang, and Tiansheng (Tony) Gu
We aim to build a sustainable, portable, and cost-efficient dryer. To develop the electronic part of the dryer, Arduino board was used as the controlling system, an AC adaptor was used to change high voltage from the household electrical receptacle to a safer low voltage of 24 V AC, and soldering tools were used to fix the electronic components on the board. Then, Solidworks was used to design the prototype and build the 3D model. We used 3D printing to produce the parts we need.
Team 15: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer With 2 Smart Working Modes And Functional User Interface
Presenters: Yingrui Yang, Pedro Petraglia, Zhibo Zhao, Bike Zhang, and Daniel Lee
The topic of this project is Energy Recovery Dryer. The objective is to design and assemble the components of a scaled-down prototype of a energy recovery clothes dryer with auto and manual modes with in given budget and materials. The heater of dryer should stop and restart when temperature in the drum reaches the target temperature. Moreover, there should be a functional user interface to let users set up the dryer as their wishes. There are several constraints including time limit and the size of the dryer etc. During the design process, the team encountered many alternatives, such as the sizes of the drum, the ways users communicate to the dryer, the water tray designs and several other Solidworks and mechanical designs. All alternatives are valued using certain criteria and the final decision can be made. The final design includes a dryer body, a fan for the air intake, a heater to heat the air up, a drum which stores the clothes, an LCD screen as a user interface, 5 buttons for the input of the UI and other mechanical components.
Team 16: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer With Spiked Pulley
Presenters: Yvette Li, Allen Wang, Tung Kha Le, Nadira Djafri, and Shunsuke Watanabe
The objective of this project is to design an environment-friendly and sustainable heat recovery dryer, which is capable of drying a cotton handkerchief within an hour with 24 VAC power supply. The final design of the dryer uses a drum with the diameter of 9.71cm and the height of 6.9cm. The user interface will be programmed to have three modes: Manual, Auto, and Personalize, and it will guide the user via LCD screen by displaying each steps user has to take and the temperature and humidity inside the dryer. Also, in order to increase the efficiency, the heat exchange outlet is designed to trap the moisture and let the dry air escape into the drum again, creating a recycle-air-flow inside the dryer. This will be achieved by creating a vertical space, so the humid water will condense, and hot air will rise to join the air flow. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the motor will be enhanced by creating spikes on both the motor pulley and the drum. The spikes will be placed so they will match the holes on the headband (used as a belt) when rotating, thus prevent the belt from slipping on the drum surface. After gathering each part and assembling them, the team’s design will be tested and evaluated.
Presenters: Danny Zhao, Hongrong Zhang, Chuxin Xiao, Zhijie Liu, and Huarui Hu
An energy recovery clothes dryer has been designed by our team for VANT151 project. It is a scaled-down prototype clothes dryer that has a 0.5L capacity and is powered by 24VAC 40VA. An alphanumeric LCD on its top panel is used to display the user interface, which provides several options to set the desired drying time, temperature and dryness with 5-button navigation pad beside the LCD screen. The fan and heater inside the dryer prototype were taken from a hair dryer. Other inner components such as the air duct and heat exchange outlet were all made by the 3D printing machine.
Team 2: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Heat Exchanger Outlet
Presenters: Christina Huang, George Song, Steven Yang, Justin Wang, Mint Jin, and Hyun Lee
The Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer (ERCD), differs from traditional clothes dryers which completely rely on electricity for power supply, is designed to be able to recover the energy produced by the heater and reuse this part of energy to dry the clothes, thereby saves energy and reduces electricity consumption.
The ERCD is not a realistic 1:1 scale machine. Instead, the ERCD we designed is a scaled-down prototype. The capacity is only set to be 0.5L with 24VAC 40VA power supply. Many designed features are worth mentioning. To set the drying time, inner temperature and degree of dryness, an LCD screen is installed on the top of the prototype. The screen is able to display a convenient user interface, operated by 5 buttons beside the screen. To simulate a real dryer with an adequate size, the fan and heater are disassembled from a hair dryer. 3D printing technique is used to fabricate the air duct, heat exchanger outlet, etc., and other parts to produce suitable components for the inner mechanism.
Team 3: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer
Presenters: Sohaib Qureshi, Yulin Shen, Hao Wang, Pengyu Cao, and Robbie Yang
The purpose of our project is to design an energy recovery dryer that can dry a small cotton handkerchief. Our main goal is to make a dryer that has high efficiency and low power consumption. However, there were certain constraints to the project. The dryer needs to be limited to the size 250 x 220 x 300 mm, power consumption cannot exceed 40 VA and the drum capacity should be at least 500 mL.
In order to achieve the goals within the provided constraints, many alternative designs were considered for the drum size, the user interface and the menu options. For the drum size, 3 different sizes were considered but after carefully examining all sizes the drum with a height of 10.3 cm and a diameter of 10 cm was chosen. To select the user interface, a pairwise chart was built to compare between the automatic, customized, last run and the specialised mode. The chart showed automatic and the customized mode as the best option.
Different menu options were also considered for the users such as temperature, dryness, strength, time and material. Accordingly, all the options were ranked which showed temperature, dryness and strength as the most suitable option for our design. In conclusion, our design for the dryer includes two options for the user interface, automatic and customized mode along with 3 options for the users to choose from which is the temperature, dryness and strength. Certain things still need to be designed like the tray for the condensed water and the heat sensor needs to be placed before the final working prototype can be built.
Team 4: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with High Efficiency of Heat Cycle
Presenters: Bill Zhu, Shang Gao, Aris Liu, Derrick Luo, and Yuyang Liu
Our team has designed and fabricated a scaled-down prototype of an Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer. This dryer is able to re-use the energy of exhausted air by making them flow through copper tubes, so the fresh cold air from outside will be warmed up by the exhausted air. The dryer has an LCD panel with five push buttons, and users can select auto-dry function or modify the various control settings. The entire size of the dryer is 250x220x300mm, and it includes a half-litre-sized drum.
Team 5: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer
Presenters: Runchao Yin, Gower Wang, Lucca Caputo, Omar Binfahad, and Hatem Baqi
The goal of the Enerec Dryer is to be a user friendly, practical, and most importantly, a sustainable dryer. To achieve that, a LCD screen is installed on the top of the dryer to let the user select the rotation speed of the drum, the target humidity and the temperature they want the dryer to reach. Then, when the dryer starts to operate, the fan in the dryer would turn on and air will flow through the heater then into the drum. After drying the clothes in the drum, the air will leave from the copper tubes. To make the dryer more energy efficient, the heater would turn off when the temperature reaches the pre-set value from the user. Then when the air leaves the dryer from the copper tubes, there would be an exchange of heat between the incoming air and the copper tubes. There are two major benefits due to this heat transfer. The first one is that the air that just got sucked in by the dryer would be heated up by the copper tubes and that would reduce the energy that it takes for the heater to heat up the air. The second benefit is to cool down the humid air in the tubes to condense the water in the air. Then, the dryer would collect that water for the user to utilize in other occasions and the air could be reused by the dryer. These features allow the dryer to be energy efficient and user friendly.
Team 6: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Easy Operation
Presenter(s): Yenong (Leo) Sun, Ziang (Oliver) Qiu, Huan (Bruce) Bian, Shuming (Barry) Xu, Jiawei (Kyle) Lin, Zicen (Jason) Yin
The project is to create an energy recovery clothes dryer in a period of two months. It involves several tasks from electrical wiring, Arduino coding and 3D mechanical design to physical assembling. The electrical wiring includes connecting different parts together such as power supply, LCD, fan, motor and heater on the breadboard. The coding is the core to achieve multi-functions: time, motor speed, temperature and humidity display on LCD and controlling mode and settings. The 3D design relies on a software - Solidworks where the drawing of components and the overall prototype of dryer are produced. Sometimes to fit the actual size, the actual assembling may be modified and adjusted from the preliminary design. One important feature of this dryer is its sustainability. It recycles the moist air after drying and condenses it to liquid phase. The heat released during condensation is used to warm the incoming air to continue the drying cycle. It saves both water resources and energy at the same time compared with traditional clothes dryer.
Team 7: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer With Variable Drum Speed
Presenters: Libo Yu, Zhengjie Hu, Yangtian Zhang, Zhuofei Lin, and Han Xu
The purpose for designing such an energy recovery clothes dryer is because of the high usage of electricity. Unlike the washing machine that does not have many features that could be improved, the dryer can use less energy once we recycle the air inside the chamber. This will make the dryer more electrically efficient, which lowers the cost for families and helps sustainable development.
During this project, our team’s goal is to design and build up a prototype of a energy recovery clothes dryer (EneRec Dryer). This clothes dryer recovers part of the energy in the air that exits the drum while the water carried by air will be collected in a water tray inside the dryer. This dryer is only a prototype that is scaled down, which is approximate 0.5L in volume.
This dryer equipped a liquid crystal display screen to allow the user access to the control menu and customise the drying duration and temperature. In addition, five buttons allow the user to choose different items under control menu.
The frame of the dryer is mainly aluminium sheets and extrusions, but the top panel would be plastic. The metal frame ensures the dryer have a longer life span although this is only a prototype design. In addition, the heater and wind blower are obtained from a hair dryer. The main part of the dryer is the drum, which can rotate during drying by connecting with a motor via a chain.
Team 8: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Audible Warning
Presenters: Yicong Ma, Simeng Li, Xiaojuan Mu, Hanyuan Zhou, and Vladimir Shevlyakov
The objective of this project is to design and fabricate the components and assemble a prototype of energy recovery dryer suitable for household use by July 11, 2018 with the materials provided by the instructor. The current energy efficiency of the dryer is low so this project will try to make a prototype of the clothes dryer that can improve the current energy efficiency. We considered alternative designs for drum size, user interface, water collection, placement of temperature and humidity sensor, the way to support the drum and the way to rotate the drum. Our final drum is 6.8 cm in height and its radius is 5 cm. The user interface includes 5 buttons and one liquid crystal display, which are at the left side of the top panel. The dryer has auto and manual operating modes. For the manual mode, the user can set desired drying time, temperature, the speed of rotation of the drum and dryness. When the drum starts to rotate and stops rotating, warning sound will be made. Our final design of the water collection is a tray with a semicircular handle. The sensor is placed on the air duct, where the hot humid air comes out from the drum. Four rollers will support the drum, and the belt will be used to rotate the drum.
Team 9: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer With Modular Design
Presenters: Charlie Lan, Colin Jin, David Zhao, and Jerry Feng
In this project, a clothes dryer prototype is built. The special feature of this prototype is a heating-cooling energy recovery element with no power-driven cooling component. Other features include a user interface made by 1 LCD screen and 5 buttons and a front-opening dryer door. Constraints of the project includes 40 VA maximum power usage, 1-hour maximum drying time, and a limited size of 250x220x300 mm. Project group consists of 4 members contributing mechanical, electronic, electrical, and documentation work. Alternative designs are discussed and the final design is chosen and built.
Team 10: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Remote Control
Presenters: Eric Ngo, Dudu Wu, Jianhong He, Luca Lu, and Tiffany Li
Recently, various types of clothes dryers with their own distinct attractive features have appeared on the market. In contrast, there are not many dryers that are particularly used for small size fabrics like handkerchiefs or cloths. As a part of VANT 151 project, our group would like to introduce a mini convenience dryer that is mobile and can be utilised everywhere.
The dryer can be divided into two parts: hardware and software. The basic hardware parts include a fan, a heater, a motor, a LCD display, 5 interface buttons and a remote sensor in which they are connected into a circuit with 2 Arduinos, 2 channel relay module by electronic components like wires, resistors, transistors, etc. The fan blows the heat into the drum while the motor rotates the drum forming a heating system. The role of the fan is also to pump the moist air outside the dryer. A program is loaded and executed on the Arduino to operate the heat - drum system in which it creates different dry modes. The dry modes comprise automatic and manual are displayed on the LCD screen so that users can either select their preference using the interface buttons or the remote sensor. The dryer has several special features such as remote control, fast input processing (button de-bounce), bidirectional drum rotation and cooling systems to smoothen fabrics.
Team 11: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Heart
Presenters: Alan Ni, Sally Song, Harvey Bai, Betty Wang, and Jorden Lou
Team 12: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer
Presenters: Wangxuejuan Yang, Mingjun Wang, Chunqi Zhan, Mingxia Yao, and Jingyi Xu
We have designed a scaled-down prototype of an Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer. The drum with the height of 70mm and diameter of 100mm were chosen. A thin tray with the height of 8mm was designed to collect condensed water from copper tube. The internal end of the tray is a semicircle with diameter of 40mm to make sure no leakage of water. To connect the motor with the drum, two pulleys are used to fasten the belt or the rubber band in order to effectively drive the drum. To fix the drum on the Air Duct, six rollers were installed on the Air Duct by screws to ensure the drum was fixed exactly and rotate freely. To fix Air Duct on the bottom panel, six foot-mounting brackets with two holes on each side of the right triangle were designed and installed on both sides of the Air Duct to stabilize it. The breadboard was placed on the bottom panel. The humidity sensor and temperature sensor, covered with protective plastic with breather holes, were fixed to the inner wall of the drum.
Team 13: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Emergency Reset System
Presenters: James Li, Joey Chan, Kay Wang, and Rose Xia
The purpose of the project is to build a scaled-down prototype of an energy recovery (EneRec Dryer) clothes dryer with size not exceeding 250x220x300 mm and at least 0.5L capacity. The requirement of this dryer is that the dryer should be able to dry a cotton handkerchief within an hour, and the maximum allowable power consumption should be 24 VAC, 40 VA. In our design, there is an emergency reset button on the top panel of the dryer. The function of this button is to reset the control system and stop the dryer when the dryer is in operation. The reason why this design was used is that safety is critical for the dryer. If the dryer is not working properly, the user can easily stop/reset the system without disconnecting the power source of the dryer.
Team 14: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer with Large Capacity Water Tray
Presenters: Yizhou (Harry) Shen, Jianyu (Bruce) Gu, Shuangyu (Saki) Wang, and Tiansheng (Tony) Gu
We aim to build a sustainable, portable, and cost-efficient dryer. To develop the electronic part of the dryer, Arduino board was used as the controlling system, an AC adaptor was used to change high voltage from the household electrical receptacle to a safer low voltage of 24 V AC, and soldering tools were used to fix the electronic components on the board. Then, Solidworks was used to design the prototype and build the 3D model. We used 3D printing to produce the parts we need.
Team 15: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer With 2 Smart Working Modes And Functional User Interface
Presenters: Yingrui Yang, Pedro Petraglia, Zhibo Zhao, Bike Zhang, and Daniel Lee
The topic of this project is Energy Recovery Dryer. The objective is to design and assemble the components of a scaled-down prototype of a energy recovery clothes dryer with auto and manual modes with in given budget and materials. The heater of dryer should stop and restart when temperature in the drum reaches the target temperature. Moreover, there should be a functional user interface to let users set up the dryer as their wishes. There are several constraints including time limit and the size of the dryer etc. During the design process, the team encountered many alternatives, such as the sizes of the drum, the ways users communicate to the dryer, the water tray designs and several other Solidworks and mechanical designs. All alternatives are valued using certain criteria and the final decision can be made. The final design includes a dryer body, a fan for the air intake, a heater to heat the air up, a drum which stores the clothes, an LCD screen as a user interface, 5 buttons for the input of the UI and other mechanical components.
Team 16: Energy Recovery Clothes Dryer With Spiked Pulley
Presenters: Yvette Li, Allen Wang, Tung Kha Le, Nadira Djafri, and Shunsuke Watanabe
The objective of this project is to design an environment-friendly and sustainable heat recovery dryer, which is capable of drying a cotton handkerchief within an hour with 24 VAC power supply. The final design of the dryer uses a drum with the diameter of 9.71cm and the height of 6.9cm. The user interface will be programmed to have three modes: Manual, Auto, and Personalize, and it will guide the user via LCD screen by displaying each steps user has to take and the temperature and humidity inside the dryer. Also, in order to increase the efficiency, the heat exchange outlet is designed to trap the moisture and let the dry air escape into the drum again, creating a recycle-air-flow inside the dryer. This will be achieved by creating a vertical space, so the humid water will condense, and hot air will rise to join the air flow. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the motor will be enhanced by creating spikes on both the motor pulley and the drum. The spikes will be placed so they will match the holes on the headband (used as a belt) when rotating, thus prevent the belt from slipping on the drum surface. After gathering each part and assembling them, the team’s design will be tested and evaluated.