Product development of a fixation unit in an instant thread colouring device.

• Main Authors: Videfors, Karin, Wadman, Christoffer
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Other Mechanical Engineering; Annan maskinteknik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-39838

This master thesis has been carried out as a product development project incollaboration with Coloreel. The aim of the study was to optimize the fixation unit inan instant thread colouring machine.The research questions were:1. In what other ways could the function of the fixation unit be designed?2. How do the generated concepts perform compared to the present solutionregarding energy efficiency?Within this master thesis the authors went through all the initial stages in a productdevelopment process. The focus in the beginning of the process was to get to know theproduct’s functions and its requirements. The function of the unit, creating heat, wasthe basis for the concept generation.Two of the concepts were evaluated as most promising concept for creating heat in thefixation unit. They were, replacing one of the heating elements with a reflector andusing hot air. To verify the proof of the concept an experiment was carried out. Theexperiment showed that replacing one heating element with a reflector resulted in ahuge difference in the reached temperature. The conclusion was that the reflector usedin the study was not as effective as the present solution with the two heating elements.When using hot air, the temperature reached high enough, but the energy consumptionexceeded the present fixation unit solution. The conclusion was that these conceptscould not be used to replace the present solution in the way the concepts are designedtoday.Concept generation was also conducted regarding the mechanical solution for openingthe heating elements. Two concepts were constructed in CAD and evaluated to makesure that they could meet the requirement of the machine. Only one of the concepts wasassessed to fulfil all the requirements.