By Ng Shea Cheing, Lead Mechanical Engineer.

The Starting Line

You’ve probably heard this a thousand times, quotes and proverbs about taking the first step, about turning your intentions to actions. But let’s be honest, one can’t possibly go for it just like that without properly thinking it through or getting a rough assurance that this is going to work out in the end.

The same applies to any products that we design. We don’t just blindly take in any product enquiry and immediately embark on the journey from the get-go. In essence, a product is a solution to problems, and the key to this lock is how well this product going to solve that particular problem. The best way to answer that question, of course, is to have the actual product and try it out yourself. But not all products are readily available, and to fully develop a product realistically takes a minimum of 8 months or even years. Thus, the more practical way for us to get some affirmation is to test or validate its concept.

Amidst the COVID-19 outbreak and MCO, Expedio initiated an internal design challenge. The brief? To design something to solve issues or problems that have emerged particularly from this period, regardless of any fixed aspect. The following articles are the phases and events that took place for one of the problems we chose to tackle in regard to this design challenge.

PHASE I – Define the Problem

Every journey starts with a destination, and the destination in this case was discovered by a photo posted by one of the frontline doctors on his social media, in which he is seen to be drenched in sweat from head to toe after finishing his shift in full personal protective equipment (PPE). It seems that being donned in full PPE means your whole body except your face is constantly in an air-tight environment, and the heat generated by your body will be trapped inside. Convection couldn’t occur because air is also placed under MCO, they have to “duduk dalam PPE.” Hence, we then had our

PROBLEM STATEMENT
Front liners have to work under an environment which is hot and uncomfortable.

PHASE II – Define and Validate Concept

Once you have the problem, the next question to ask is “how.” The first thing that struck us is the simplest and most straightforward: Use a fan to create air circulation to redistribute or remove heat. As expected, when we did a quick google search, such products are already out there. One of it being this product from Tajima, where it’s a fan that you mount on your belt, and the funnel guides air from the fan to the back of your body.

At this point, one might think, let’s just buy a hundred of these and problem solved. But we at Expedio tend to be a bit conservative in the sense where, we won’t take what we see out there as it is. We prefer to experience it hands-on to convince ourselves how well a product or method works. However, this product isn’t readily available in Malaysia, and there isn’t anything equivalent or similar ones that is accessible. Thus, concept prototype V1.0 and V1.1 were born out of cooling fans lingering around the office, elastic band, and some 3D prints. V1.0 is a crude version of Tajima’s fan; a single upwards blowing fan where; V1.1 is a modified version where two fans are mounted in a fashion where it blows directly towards the body.

We gave both prototypes a quick test and pulled out a few key points, which were:

The body can ‘feel’ the air movement generated
Blowing towards the body is better than blowing upwards directly
The surface in contact with the body needs to be big to prevent wobbling. (or using 2 straps instead of 1
Need to have a big enough gap for air intake for better airflow.

Again, as mentioned before that Expedio is rather conservative, thus we are not easily convinced just with 1 round of test. So, we move on to the next stage, where to concept is again put to the test.

PHASE III – Refine and Revalidate Concept

In this phase, we start to crit and magnify the other minor aspects related to this approach in detail as there are more to this product than just the fan part. More questions that we ask ourselves are:

How to secure it to the belt, or is it not going to be secured to a belt?
Where’s the power source?
What happens when you move around with this?
Is it strapped on the waist or somewhere higher or lower?

For the key points from the first test and questions listed above, we added a restriction which was to achieve them with the least amount of external components as the implementation of MCO is making components harder to source, even screws. Hence for concept prototype V2.0, we designed the 3D model with fixtures such as snap fits and slots, and even adjusted it to require minimum amount of support during the printing process. We used a 5V fan so that it can be powered off with a power bank and did a clip design to attach the proto to a standard belt that we have on hand. Other than this, we’ve also created a V2.1, where it will be placed on the neck area instead of the waist to compare the differences blowing on different areas of the body.

When we say we critique all aspects, we mean all the way to the testing part, where we try to mimic the actual conditions and environment this product is going to be used under. The prototype was strapped on an actual belt, then worn under a shirt, and finally topped off with a raincoat. We threw in the raincoat because our intention for this fan is to be worn inside a full PPE, and since we couldn’t get our hands on an actual PPE, a raincoat is the best we could get at that moment.

After a good 2 hours of wearing the setup while going along daily routines, the results are disappointing, yet not surprising. Disappointing because it didn’t really help the cooling, not surprising because it’s basic physics, the First law of Thermodynamics to be exact. Other products out there like the one from Tajima shared earlier functions almost the same, yet why our prototype doesn’t work. The problem doesn’t lie on the concept, the culprit is the situation and environment the product will be used under. This way of cooling will only be effective if cool air is being drawn by the fan to replace the hot air around the body, so that all the heat energy will be transferred via convection. But in our case, if we introduce cooler air from outside the PPE, this totally defeats the purpose of a wearing a PPE as COVID-19 can transmit thru droplets in the air. At the end of the day, we are merely circulating the hot air in the PPE, but not transferring the heat energy trapped in the suit. To make things even worse, more heat is generated inside the PPE as we couldn’t ignore the friction-generated heat by the fan’s motor.

PHASE IV – Reflect and Re-evaluate Concept

Is there a solution for the issues we face? We can cut a hole on the PPE, put a filter and draw air from outside. This is a straightforward way to deal with it, but also an extremely unpractical one, not forgetting to mention its also a very bad solution. No healthcare practitioner is going to cut a hole on their PPE, and even if they do and got infected, blame will most likely to fall on the product, together with a lawyer letter perhaps.

Another way we can do is to use a different medium to transfer the heat, like how air conditioner or astronaut suit works. We can use closed loop pipes with circulating water and coolant in it and let the heat to be transferred out of the PPE via the circulating liquid. The risk of contamination is greatly reduced but looking at the number of components and testing required to pull off this method, it’s a path that we decided not to pursue as it demands a very large amount of resources.

The Final Say

After all the hustle, we collectively decided to abandon ship. It isn’t a glorious thing to do, but is it the correct thing to do? When faced with problems, we are always encouraged to persevere, try harder, stand up where you fall; and maybe after 10,000 tries we could be the next Thomas Edison. Yet, we decided otherwise based on the line we drew between recklessness and confidence. Its hard to push through, but its equally hard to let go, especially on ideas that you believe in. However, we at Expedio believes that by letting go, we open up our minds to wander, to explore, for the next problem is out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be solved.

Interested to develop an idea for COVID-19?

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