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road Traction
mt2546 - Project course
A look at the methods of clearing roads from snow to increase traction for our cars
Why?
Global warming has led to our weather growing more violent and temperature fluctuations become more comon for every year
One of the biggest factors in road repair and maintenance in Sweden are the misuse of studded tires.
What have we done?
Workflow
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During this project we have been working with the macro process. This a way of working with Projects and being creative when innovating. It consist of 6 stages which you work through.
Interviews
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To get a better understanding of the scope of the project we intervied different people with difffrent connection to the Area
Benchmarking
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Looking at the marked we found that there are alot of solutions out there that aims to help drivers get better traction. There are solutions ranging from tire and rubber combinations to heating pipes in the roads that melts the snow and ice.
Observations
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Outside of reaching out for interviews we also did alot of observations online looking for information about the subject. we learnt alot about how weather could affect the road and increase the damage that happend both to the road but also to the area around it. we used tools like How might we and six pin star to help us evalute the problems we faced
Ideation
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We came up with 20 ideas that we feelt where different enough and that had atleast some potential. From these we then narrowed it down to 5 ideas by discussing the viability, feasability and desiability of each solution
Choosing a solution
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Those five ideas we choose where then taken through a Six thinking had model. Here we worked out the strenghts and weaknesses for each of the five solutions
PRototyping
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Having gone through the six thinking hats we chosoe the idea of having studded tires that could deploy studds only when needed. To test the idea we did a quick prototype to show how the main function would work
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Feedback
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To gain futher knowledge and get a better understanding of the prodject we showed the idea and prototype to our peers and coaches who gave us feedback and things to consider when going forward
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Further Prototyping
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With this newly gatheres insight we proceeded to prototype the solution again. This time we aimed to make a working prototype of the studd deployment system.
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Our Final Prototype
The mechanism
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The mechanism works like your ordinary pen where the pen tip can click in and out and stay in or out. This actions is triggered by a solenoid clicking to either deploy or retract the stud. This way the soledoid is only active when the stud is clicked in or out. this way we require very lire power to have these studs on the wheel.
How Would it work then?
Deployment of studds
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We believe that the studs and their deployment mechanism could work in conjunction with the ABS ESC systems that every new car has onboard. Since the ABS and ESC are system that take effect when the car starts loosing traction we felt that we could utilize this. The need for studs is when the car is loosing its traction due to factors like ice,snow or water. In these situations Either the ABS or ESC will kick in and stop the tires from skidding too much. With our stud system we can deploy the studs at the exact moment the tire starts slipping and help the ABS and or ESC systems. With this system the tires does not have studs when not absolutely necessary and can therefore decrease the damage on our road.
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