Rain Water Energy Harvest

Rain Water Energy Harvest

We are a design team in a large green technology company and we have been commissioned to do a design with the following mission statement:

Design a device to convert the potential energy of rain fallowing on residential houses into energy and store it in batteries. The main buyers of this device are regular home-owners and builders. The product is to be DIY and available at home-improvement retail stores. The device is to have a payback period of 5 years in an area with an average rainfall similar to Portland, Oregon.

The Seven Steps of the Design Process

1.  – Develop PDS – PDS document (dynamic document)

2.  – External search - Existing products and related technologies (Research)

3.  – Internal search (Brainstorming) – Lots of ideas

4.  – Evaluation and selection – Select one idea to pursue

5.  – Detail design (engineering) – physical details

6.  – Prototyping, testing, evaluating – feasibility evaluation, improvement suggestions

7.  – Documentation – production drawings, design process, user manual, safety guidelines

Identification of Customers

External customers

Internal customers

Reorganizing customer needs in terms of PDS categories

This table can be filled out in any order until all customer needs are done

Selecting Metrics and Setting Targets

Creating a House of Quality Summary of PDS