Session: 15-01-01: ASME International Undergraduate Research and Design Exposition

Paper Number: 95428

95428 - Design of a Mobile Kids-Friendly Handwashing Station for a Daycare 

There is no doubt that COVID-19 has changed our way of life. With over 12 million US child COVID-19 cases some daycares are stepping up to help reduce the transmission. To reduce the transmission of COVID-19 and other illnesses daycares around the nation are implementing handwashing procedures for all students before entering the school. Currently, most commercial handwashing stations are too expensive and or not made for kids. For the Fall 2021 First-Year Seminar (FYS) Service-Learning Project (SLP), students were tasked with designing a new portable and affordable, youth-sized handwashing station that could appeal to kids. Our team designed a dual electric pump solution to allow 50 students to wash their hands in 25 minutes. After being funded to create our solution, we built our first prototype and presented it for our class final. After making some final adjustments to that design, we will deliver it to a local daycare.

Our design includes a 54” tall, rectangular PVC structure that can hold 10 gallons of water and 10 gallons of drainage. The small size of this system will be perfect for kids attending daycare. Through careful calculations we determined that if 50 kids were to wash their hands each day, we would need 10 gallons of water to do so. In our Arduino driven pump system we allocated 40 seconds of handwashing for each student. This is comprised of 20 seconds of scrubbing (Phase A) and 20 seconds of rinsing (Phase B). In order to activate the soap, the machine will dispense .75 cups of water before starting Phase A. This leaves 2.45 cups to rinse their hands off during Phase B. Including the estimate time to grab a paper towel and dispense soap, we expect each student to be through the operation cycle in under a min. In order to save on time, we decided to split the pump system into two. This would halve the total time to get through all kids resulting in 25min to get through all the kids. We are choosing our proposed design because it is cost and time efficient as well as suitable for young children.

For our design, we decided to go with something that would be easy to build as well as fulfilling all the requirements. In order to do so we are using PVC components (“Core PVC Frame”) to build the core frame of our design. This allows us to create a frame that’s just big enough for the children to reach. We opted into using two mirroring “Water Loops” to halve the time it would take to process the number of kids using this device. This uses five-gallon water bottles commonly found in Walmart’s around the country. This allows for easy swapping in the case of the device running out of water. We also chose to use a stainless-steel salad bowl as our sink as normal sinks cost a lot of money. This solution should be durable and sanitary. We wanted to ensure that kids do not waste time while washing their hands, so we included an electronics system that is designed to keep the students on task using LEDs and dispenses the correct amount of water using the DC pump. UV LEDs can also be implemented to help increase the amount of sanitization happening. The DC pump will be at the base of our design. These electronics are controlled by an Arduino and a PWM controller. To power our system, we will include a rechargeable battery strong enough to power the Arduino and Pump, but also could be plugged into the wall to provide a long-term power solution. To maintain portability, we also plan on attaching swivel wheels to the corners.

Presenting Author: Daniel E Rutkowski Gannon University

Presenting Author Biography: Mr. Daniel Rutkowski is an undergraduate student at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Gannon University.

Authors:

Daniel E Rutkowski Gannon University
Grant B Williams Gannon University
Hasan F Al-Haraz Gannon University
Pezhman Hassanpour Gannon University