Produktutveckling av komfortlösning till lastbilshytt

Sammanfattning: This report describes a project carried out in cooperation with Klippan Safety AB. The purpose of this project has been to develop a product that facilitates the living area in a truck cabin for the customers. To be able to develop, in a structured way, that kind of product, the project has been based on different product development theories. The project contained of following parts: marketing research, product generation, product evaluation and prototyping. After information from the marketing research and discussions with the company, the decision was made that the task was going to consist an improvement of the existing product referred to as 'the comfort module'. This product is a bed module with extra storage, a washbasin with flowing water among other things. Further investigations showed that there is a need for a bed with variable width for the comfort module, to ease the use and increase comfort. After some time, it appeared that the difficulty in this project was going to be to develop a mattress to be adjustable in width. With this in mind, and the fact that the time was running out, the project only came to consider development of the mattress. During the generation of concepts, the work had to be divided into two parts: mattress filling and mattress clothing. For the expandable part of the mattress filling, the material IntelliGel was brought to light. The properties of this material were considered to fulfil many of the requirements that were set. But it has been difficulties to receive IntelliGel, and because of that the part of the mattress was missing in the result. Alternative solutions were searched for and proposal work has been given. The construction of the prototype has therefore been focused on manufacture the mattress clothing, where a few variants have been sewn and tested. To be able to test them properly, a testing frame has been used. The result came to be a mattress clothing with variable width, and the prototype showed how it worked together with a foam mattress in the testing frame of different bed widths. The finished prototype appears to have development possibilities, where a fully functional solution estimates to be possible. The conclusions and experiences that have been made from this project could therefore be helpful in further work.