Travel Electric Toothbrush Project

Jarad JupenaJustin Lewis

Garrett GroceSam Gadebusch

10.7.11

Project Design Outline

1. Recording and measuring of various aspects of toothbrush

- decibels, mass, voltage, amperes, battery life, main parts of toothbrush, customer needs

2. Dissection of toothbrush

- Bill of Materials and massing of parts 3. Completion of Project 1

- creation of design ideas, morphological chart, external and patent search 4. Concept Generation and Design Selection

- selected final design, created design on SolidWorks 5. Compiled it all into the final Project 1 lab report

Project ManagementJarad Jupena- Bill of Materials, revised Lab report 1,

benchmarking, concept generation

Justin Lewis- SolidWorks, concept generation, revised lab report 1

Sam Gadebusch- Literature review, patent search, problem statements, concept generation

Garrett Groce- Customer needs, created design images for morphological chart, concept generation

Customer Needs 1. Portable (0.30, 0.30) 1.1 Compact (0.10, 0.34) 1.2 Light (0.05, 0.17) 1.3 Compact Power Source (0.05, 0.16) 1.4 Collapsible (0.10, 0.33) 2. Efficient (0.10, 0.10) 2.1 Good Battery Utilization (0.05, 0.50) 2.2 Long Life (0.05, 0.50) 3. User Friendly (0.20, 0.20) 3.1 Easy Maintenance (0.05, 0.25) 3.2 Little to no noise (0.05, 0.25) 3.3 Minimal work required to use (0.05, 0.25) 3.4 Usable by all age groups (0.05, 0.25) 4. Functional (0.20, 0.20) 4.1 Reach all points of mouth (0.10, 0.50) 4.2 Effectively cleans (0.10, 0.50) 5. Durable (0.20, 0.20) 5.1 Reliable (0.10, 0.50) 5.2 Not easily destructible (0.10, 0.50)   C. 1 Retail Under $50

Revised Problem Statement Now that we have prioritized

our customer needs, we can begin to tackle various problems. The toothbrush must be lightweight, durable, inexpensive, safe, and effective, just to name a few. The tricky part is that we must satisfy all of our customer needs, however at the same time, we must not sacrifice any of integrity of our design.

External Search Summary We used the web for our patent search, which helped with

our design process. Specifically, we used patents: US 2010/0199445 A1 US 7,168,121 B2 US D454,695 S US 2006/0210352 A1 US 2003/0041396 A1

These patents helped us know what types of ideas are already on the market, but it allowed us to improve and combine ideas from other designs.

For our benchmarking we compared the following different products of the same type: Oral B Smartseries 4000 Oral B AP 400 Phillips Sonicare Essence Oral B Pulsonic Ultreo Ultrasound

Power Generation and Power Accessories

Corded design, no batteries – brush will require a power cord and outlet

Single battery design – brush will run on one battery to increase portability

Double battery design – brush will run on two batteries for longer battery use

Charging base with rechargeable battery – brush will be charged and not need replacement batteries

Human Factors/ Body Design Folding Brush design – brush will collapse into itself

decreasing stored size

Ergonomic grip – brush will conform to hand for the purpose of comfort

Slim design – brush will have slim design in order to be more portable

Wrap around handle – brush will have hand enclosing design for better grip

Energy Mechanism for Brush Head

Small Gear Ratio – Brushhead will have a small gear ratio to maximize rotations of brush.

Multilevel Power Setting – brush will be able to change intensity to conserve energy

Fully Rotating head – contains a shaft that rotates a wheel offering full 360 degree rotation of head

Brush Head Design

Curved head design – brushhead will be curved to reach more parts of mouth

Telescoping head design – head will collapse into itself for increased portability

Multihead design – brush will contain 2 differently moving heads for better cleaning

Inversely rotating multihead – brush will have 2 heads rotating in opposite directions

Morphological Concept ChartPower Generation and Power Accessories

Human Factors Body Design Energy Mechanism for Brush Head

Brush Head Design

1

2

3

4

Concept Selection We created the Pugh chart, and created a weighted system

of five customer needs (portability, efficiency, user-friendliness, functionality, durability). The points were added up, and it was clear which design we selected. The “folding brush design” is the most well rounded design that we believe would be the most successful and worthy design for the travel electric toothbrush market today. Now are able to use this information to construct a final design of our product.

Concept Selection ContinuedDescription

Criteria Weight

Portability 0.3 2 0 1 0 -1 1

Efficiency 0.1 0 1 0 0 0 0

User-friendliness

0.2 1 1 1 1 0 2

Functionality 0.2 0 0 -1 0 1 0

Durability 0.2 -1 0 0 0 1 -1

Net score 0.6 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.5

Rank 1 3 4 5 6 2

Final Design

Our final design is a combination of the most important characteristics we selected from our pugh chart.

We chose a single battery design for portability purposes.

The brush has a folding handle for portability.

The multihead design was the most functional option for our toothbrush.

Sketch of Final Design

Final Design

This is the final design of our toothbrush created in SolidWorks.

How does it work?Our toothbrush is designed for travel use. For this

reason the motor inside it is powered by a single AA battery.

The toothbrush head moves because of an oscillating shaft that is extended from a stepper motor and set to go back and forth rapidly. The shaft is put into a set of gears within the head of the toothbrush causing the gears to turn the brushheads while the toothbrush power is engaged.

The toothbrush not only has an effective method of brushing teeth but can also be easily stored by folding the head down into the grip, cutting the length of the toothbrush almost in half.

Closing statement In conclusion, our toothbrush has been fully redesigned and

we feel that it is much more effective as a travel toothbrush. The original toothbrush faced the problems of weight, portability and brushing effectiveness. Our new redesigned brush is much lighter, collapsible and even has a better brushhead on it. We feel that the design we presented fully meets our requirements set forth in our original customer needs statement.