Publication:
Design of a lightweight and compact wheelchair

Date
2015
Authors
Roshan Suntharamurthy
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Research Projects
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Abstract
This thesis emphasizes on designing of a lightweight and compact wheelchair for the disabled people. Wheelchair is one of the commonly used assistive device in the world. Most of the people who use wheelchair usually have default in walking, lifting reaching and so on. Manually propelled wheelchair is one of the commonly used type of wheelchair due to its availability and low costing. The manually propelled wheelchair may be the obvious choice, but due to their heavy framework and importable design, they usually require a large space to be stored. This project then will be focused in designing a lightweight and compact manually propelled wheelchair to allow the user to perform their daily life activities with ease. While designing this wheelchair, the wheelchair also needs to fulfill safety aspects, where it will be safe for the user to use the wheelchair and also affordable at the same time. From the literature reviews, and surveys conducted, the design requirement was finalized. From the design requirement, three concepts were generated where each concept had to fulfill the requirement given. Using the method of Pugh matrix and House of Quality, a final design was selected. The final design then was created using SolidWorks. After some modification and changes later, the stress analysis and the Factor of Safety of the wheelchair were simulated using the same software. A simple costing analysis was conducted to estimate the price of the wheelchair once if it is built in full scale. A simple scale down prototype was also built to show the folding mechanism of the wheelchair. The prototype was built using 3D printing.
Description
TJ181.5.R67 2015
Keywords
Wheelchairs
Citation