Welcome to Week 3 Blog,
Thought Process:
Using SCAMPER we came up with many different ideas on how to accomplish the set scenario.
One such idea was to keep the used hot water in a holding tank before the tank holding the
soft-boiled egg.
This would ensure a steady stream of water to keep the eggs warm.
SCAMPER helped our group to come up with different versions of the design to keep the eggs
warm.
In the end, the group came up with several possible designs that could be implemented.
Another idea that we came up with is the Power-Pipe, as we wanted to reuse the hot water that
one showers with.
We decided to use the Power-Pipe as the application of harnessing back the low-grade heat
and use it to heat incoming cold water, by doing so the heater is able to use lesser energy
when heating the cold water up to the desired temperature.
We then proceeded to use SCAMPER and COWS to finalize our decisions.
Using SCAMPER, we have created and generated many different chemical product ideas
for our topic. However, there was one problem. We could only use 1 idea as our final design.
Luckily, we were able to make use of the Feasibility Analysis Table to help us remove
impractical ideas and determine which idea is best suited for us.
What is the Feasibility Analysis Table? It is a checklist that allows us to
determine which idea is impractical and which ideas we can carry on with.
Table 1: Feasibility Analysis Table
Let us use the Feasibility Analysis Table for our different designs right now. Firstly, the Egg Cooker, as
you can see, the Egg Cooker ticks all the boxes, this means that it is a decent idea and it can be carried out.
Table 2: Feasibility analysis for Egg Cooker
Next, we have the Power-pipe. Similar to the Egg Cooker, it checks all the boxes in the Feasibility Table
as well. What do we do to determine which idea to use now?
Table 3: Feasibility analysis for Power-Pipe
Fret not, as we also have the COWS matrix to help us further determine which idea should we use.
After the Feasibility Table, we then did the COWS matrix to see which idea was suitable to do.
The COWS matrix is something we are all very familiar with as us chemical engineering students
have learned it in a module called CP5091, Materials for Design.
COWS matrix is basically a decision matrix to evaluate and select materials for components of a
chemical product. COWS stands for four component of the decision matrix:
C-Criteria
O-Options
W-Weightages
S-Scores
These four key components will help us decide on the material most suitable for the chemical product.
The ideas that we have gotten after doing the Feasibility Table are an egg maker and a power pipe.
We have to use the COWS matrix to make an egg cooker, the question we should ask ourselves
is “Is the idea sustainable in the long run” or “Which idea will be the cheapest and most reliable to build”,
this is where the COWS matrix comes in place!
Figure 2: Design for Egg Cooker
Table 4: COWS Decision Matrix
After using the COWS matrix, the egg cooker is the final winner with a score of 250.
Our final product that we have decided on is the egg cooker, the idea was selected after much
consideration and after all the different decision matrices. The egg cooker is what our group
thinks is the most reliable and efficient way of harnessing low-grade heat energy.
Reflection:
This week's content is building on last week's literature review, by doing the last week's activity we still found
it hard to generate the different ideas using the SCAMPER model as for our group we found "Harnessing
low-grade heat" to be hard to generate ideas on. However, the team persevered on and we came up with 2
different ideas related to our scope of area and managed to finalise with the Egg Cooker as the idea that we
want to work on.
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