TU/e, Industrial Design and URE
Kelvin
Sustainable heating for your home
Klevin is a product designed for my final bachelor project industrial design
Kelvin is a home battery pack for solar-powered heating.
It is designed to maximize the energy usage of your solar panels while providing a new heating solution. It transforms the way you warm yourself inside your home.
Conventional heating methods are responsible for roughly 80% of household energy usage. Kelvin addresses this problem by offering three portable heating modules that utilize infrared heating panels. By using infrared radiation, Kelvin provides localized heating, directing warmth directly onto your body instead of heating the surrounding air around you. This method not only offers greater efficiency but also delivers a more comfortable and enjoyable heating experience.
The flexibility of Kelvin allows you to take the warmth wherever you go, both inside and outside your home. The portable heating modules provide a convenient heating solution that adapts to the user's needs. No longer bound by fixed heating systems, Kelvin allows you to create a comfortable environment anywhere you go.
By using battery power, the heating modules encourage users to become more conscious of their energy consumption. With a finite amount of energy stored, users develop a heightened awareness of the energy they use.
Furthermore, the warm light emitted by the heating modules adds to an ambiance and coziness to your surroundings. This warm illumination enhances the overall experience, making the user feel more comfortable.
With Kelvin, you can optimize the use of your solar panels and enjoy the comforts of efficient and localized heating. Kelvin improves the way people stay warm while reducing their carbon footprint
Aesthetics of modularity
The beauty of Kelvin is that people can take a module and bring it with them, having localized and comfortable form of heat everywhere they go throughout the house. The concept behind Kelvin is to position it as a central piece in your living room, similar to a fireplace. The design allows people to gather around it or use it as a display surface for a picture frame or plant. Just like you would with an old fireplace with a mantle. To find the shape of kelvin, some sketches were made looking at the aesthetics as well as the packaging of the design. Most of the Western world has fewer than three people living in a single household on average, therefore it was chosen to have three modules as this meant that there would be at least one module for each person in the household. A battery life of 6 hours for a module with one heater would be possible. This would be sufficient heating for a person on a long evening. A module with two heaters would thus have a battery life of 3 hours roughly which is significantly less but on the lower limit of acceptable.
From cardboard to final prototype
Having an idea in mind is beautiful, but things might not always work out in the real world. Therefore it is important to make quick and easy prototypes of your design rather early in the process. You can figure out if things would work or not or if they are even able to be produced or not. Before making the final design, I first made a cardboard prototype to get some initial feedback for when I start to make the final prototype. The model was made from cardboard and some foam, held together by some duct tape. Now I had a prototype that I could get some first insights on to improve before making the final design a reality. This helped me to gain meaningful insights on how to improve my design. Making this prototype also helped me explore possible interactions further by working with my hands instead of drawing things on paper. Often you will find interesting possibilities for interaction simply by playing around with different materials and shaping them in different forms. Or combining different materials to create possible new insights.
For the final demo day, a demonstrator prototype was made to showcase the concept of Kelvin to a bigger audience. The prototype was made of MDF wood and electronics powered by multiple Arduinos. The wooden parts were sawed to size, painted, and bolted together.
The prototype contains two Arduinos, one in the main housing and one powering a single module. In the main housing, there are three LED strips for indicating the charge level of each of the modules. There are also three optical distance sensors to turn on/off the LED strips once a module is placed or removed from the housing. The Arduino in the module has a potentiometer to turn on/off the LED strip for the orange lighting. The Arduino in the main housing was also connected to a laptop running a processing script. This was to have the working data sharing via OOCSI. OOCSI is a prototyping middleware for designing distributed products. Using OOCSI is something that I had never done before previously so it was really insightful to write the code for the sharing of data for IoT products, giving me more experience on what also needs to be done on the background for designing interactive and connected products.
