Portable Shower Caddy

Overview

For this interdisciplinary project, the team was tasked with improving an existing prototype of a portable shower caddy. A shower caddy is a product that helps you take your favorite shower products on the go. It is made to fold up and fit in a large custom size shaving kit.

Objectives

The team’s main objective was to redesign the Portable Shower Caddy. This involved making it smaller and more portable to fit into a carry-on, the addition of better constructed basket to hold various shower products, and adjusting the positioning of the mirror to be more compact.

Approach

-In order to gather our customer needs, the team sent out a survey with a number of questions asking them to rate different features of the shower caddy on a scale of 1- 10. 1 as the lowest rating, and 10 as the highest. The team surveyed a number of 63 people. Additionally, the team gave the stakeholders a prototype of the shower caddy in order to visualize and have a feel for the product.

-The team engaged in concept generation and selection to come up with various ideas for the prototype. The concept generation process involved rapid prototyping with the whole group to come up with varying new designs. After this process, the team participated in physical prototyping using cardboard.

-Our sponsor had obtained a patent and a prototype made of said patent. Using these, we were able to analyze the product fully and get a good understanding of the task at hand.

-The team made use of a Computer Aided Design Software, SOLIDWORKS, to construct parts of the portable shower caddy which were then assembled together to construct a fully rendered 3d model. SOLIDWORKS was also used to run a Finite Element Analysis on this model and gain a better understanding of how the product would fare undergoing real world stresses.

-Our team created about 7 SOLIDWORKS parts and assembled the final product in a SOLIDWORKS assembly.

-We 3D printed a prototype as part of our team’s high fidelity prototyping stage. We sent the CAD files to Penn State Engineering Services so the Portable Shower Caddy could be made of stainless steel for the showcase, but, unfortunately, they weren’t able to complete the work in time.

-Our team performed testing. We made sure that the shower caddy fits first of all in a custom large size shaving kit, and that it would fold up in 30 seconds or less. As well, we tested how much weight could be added onto the shower caddy without deformation.

-To validate our model/results we sent out surveys to stakeholders to gain a better understanding of their wants and needs. After design the current prototype of the Portable Shower Caddy, we were able to conduct an FEA test to test how much weight the caddy could hold.

-For the FEA of the caddy, we varied the applied load and paid close attention to the mechanism that connects the basket to the spine. We examined the maximum shear stress (y-direction) and maximum displacement (y-direction) and determined that the basket was more than capable of handling the 20 pounds that the sponsor requires.

Outcomes

-The project resulted in a new improved design of the portable shower caddy for the sponsor, ready for business travelers, vacation travelers, military personnel, and college students to take it on the go with them.