Research Paper

Design Organization: Group 5 Date: 24 Jan 2018

Team Members: Noah Dunn, Dakota Perry, Mohanned Badwilan, Devontay Merrill

4.1. What is the problem? Why is the current situation unsatisfactory?

Many laptop cords tend to get tangled, cut, and take up a lot of space. These cords are around 10’ long and are loose at the bottom of a bag. If you don’t want them loose, you have to hand roll each side of the cord and band them together. But even with that, the cords are loose and are susceptible to cutting pulling and utter destruction of the cord.

4.2. Who is having this problem? Who are the would-be customers for a solution?

There are many different customers for this product. This would be for anyone who uses a laptop. Since this device will be mostly universal, anyone who uses a laptop will be able to use this cord reel. This includes college students, travelling salespeople, engineers, travelling corporate people and more.

4.3. What basic functions must the design perform?

The Reel Quik will help solve these problems along with having a user friendly button to help reel the cord in. with all of this combined, you will have more room in your bag for more of your travel needs while protecting your cord and saving you time.

4.4. How will the design be used by the customer(s)? Under what circumstances and in what environment? Don’t limit your considerations only to those of the end user!

This will have a button that will be pressed to retract the cord, and hopefully an auto-locking mechanism that will stop the cord from retracting itself when you don’t want it to. This can be used under a large variety of environments since laptops are so portable, so it will have to be durable overall.

4.5. What is the underlying theory or background that needs to be understood in order to address this problem?

Self-retraction using different mechanisms, locking mechanisms, material properties, and basic heat flow are topics that will need to be understood to successfully address the problem.

4.6. What prior work has been done on this problem?

Dakota has preliminary designs and calculations on the design of this product which includes different ideas on how the auto retraction will work. Some similar ideas have been done with extension cords.

4.7. What products, currently available, were not designed or intended for this particular application but could be used to perform a similar function?

Extension cord reels, cord reels, phone charging reels could all be used to perform a similar function.