Development & Optimization of a Portable Air Conditioner

Sammanfattning: This master thesis is a product development project that has been carried out between Electrolux, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. The purpose of the project was to explore the feasible opportunities within the field of portable air conditioning. User oriented studies were conducted where six key problem areas were found with the existing portable air conditioner units. A majority of the users find the unit large, hard to handle, noisy and inefficient. Furthermore, the connected exhaust air outlet that removes the heat from the room is often complicated and inefficient to use. How can a new type of portable air conditioner be developed in order to satisfy the user demands as well as containing a realistic technology on the inside? Ideas were initially generated about the unit’s overall shape and assembly. Thereafter the components were fragmented down in their own categories in order to optimize them for the new design. The result was a cylinder shaped portable air conditioner, with its air distribution in the top, distributed in a radial half circular direction out in the room. It is designed to make the handling easier for the user by using simplistic features and intuitive details. The inner components are dimensioned by references from existing portable air conditioners and placed favorably for both efficiency and maintenance. The final proposal of this project was considered to be successful. The result delivers proposals on all the six key problems, and a large part of the details in the entire air conditioner unit has been taken into account. Furthermore, the result was considered to stand out among existing portables which also contributed to the success.