This project is focused on designing and building a pool lift for a disabled girl who needs an easy way to get into her swimming pool. She is currently getting using a pool ladder to get in and out, but a pool lift will provide a safer and easier means of getting in.
The pool lift is for a girl approximately 10 years old with little to no function in her lower body. Up to now she has been getting in and out of her pool via her parents picking her up and walking down a small ladder at the edge of the pool. As she continues to grow, however, this will become increasingly difficult, and so the pool lift provides a much more sensible way to allow her in the pool.
The pool lift must do the following:
To evaluate our concepts, we scored each design in six different categories on a 1-5 scale, with some categories carrying double weight. We ranked the concepts based on manufacturability, safety, cost, transferability, compactness, and ease of use. However, when we decided that transferring from an above-ground to an in-ground pool was no longer feasible, we removed transferability from the evaluation. This resulted in a tie between concepts 2 and 4. To break the tie we first used the safety category, but as that was also a tie we used the ease of use category, and CONCEPT 4 was chosen as the basis of our designs going forward.
To evaluate our concepts, we scored each design in six different categories on a 1-5 scale, with some categories carrying double weight. We ranked the concepts based on manufacturability, safety, cost, transferability, compactness, and ease of use. However, when we decided that transferring from an above-ground to an in-ground pool was no longer feasible, we removed transferability from the evaluation. This resulted in a tie between concepts 2 and 4. To break the tie we first used the safety category, but as that was also a tie we used the ease of use category, and CONCEPT 4 was chosen as the basis of our designs going forward.
Once we chose our concept, we enhanced the design and performed multiple engineering analyses. Three analyses were performed on our design. Each analysis was worked out both by hand and in Matlab, and the processes and results are shown below.
