Light up the dust : Development of a vacuum cleaner nozzle with lights

Sammanfattning: This master thesis was conducted during the fall of 2012 at Electrolux with the purpose of developing a vacuum cleaner nozzle with lights. Several nozzles with an integrated lighting system can be found on the market today. However, most of these nozzles are provided with power through cords from the vacuum cleaner body which results in the nozzle only being compatible with specially designed vacuum cleaners. This project aimed at developing an ordinary vacuum cleaner nozzle with lights, being compatible with regular vacuum cleaners. The development was performed by doing modifications to an already existing vacuum cleaner nozzle.The overall method applied during this master thesis was based on an in-house process which is used at Electrolux where the progress is divided into four phases. Each phase ends with a presentation for a project steering committee consisting of experts from Electrolux with a profound interest in the project.The project began with a pre study where existing products and patents were investigated. Furthermore all wishes and constraints of the product were compiled into a list of design specifications. The product development was broken down into three sub problems; how to supply the lights with electricity, how to activate and deactivate the lights and how to integrate the lights to the nozzle. To generate as many ideas as possible regarding the three sub problems, semi-structured interviews and a brainstorming session were conducted together with employees at Electrolux. The most interesting ideas were further developed as concepts and the best solutions to each sub problem were eventually chosen together with the project steering committee.The final solution had four LED lights positioned on top of the nozzle and these were powered by two serial connected AAA batteries. The lights were activated and deactivated automatically when the vacuum cleaner was turned on an off. However, the final method used for activating and deactivating the lights is not further explained in this report due to business strategic reasons of Electrolux. Experiments were conducted to choose the components of the suggested solution. To boost the output voltage in order to receive a stable illumination some electronics were connected to the components. The suggested nozzle did fulfill all constraints stated in the product design specifications