CGSociety

This was my Major Design Project for my degree which I completed just over a year ago. The brief from my placement company was to design a vacuum cleaner which didn't use electricity to work but still employed a vacuum fan system that was more efficient than a conventional floor sweeper.

A lot of engineering concepts were used on this such a snail casing around the fan to accelereate the air being moved by the fan. A flywheel/clutch bearing system was used to keep the fan spinning when it was not being driven by the wheels, and a trick gearing system in the main gearbox. to turn the drive through 90 degrees and increase the gearing ratio at the same time. There is a 6:1 drive ration from the main wheels to the drive axel and a further 8:1 drive ratio from the gearbox to the fan, which should provide a fan RPM of 6000 (about half the speed of an electric leaf blower) not accounting for frictional losses or slippage at the drive wheels.

The entire project was engineered in solid works and then rapid prototyped into a working product using a stereolithography machine from the CAD data. I then finished and painted each component. These visuals were used for my display boards. The Solid Works data was taken into Rhino and then into Studio Max 9 and rendered in mental ray with a three light studio setup. Post work was completed in photoshop.