After going to the gym or pool, people are left with a wet towel in their car and no real efficient way to dry it. Although people try their best to hang their wet towels up in their car, the result is almost always a smelly towel and a smelly car. This problem was brought to our attention when we realized how much we hate the obnoxious task of dealing with wet towels after swimming and working out. After thinking about our irritations about dealing with wet towels in the car, we were inspired to think of a better way to address this problem than attempting to hang up towels in the car.
We began by exploring different methods of successfully drying a towel that was possible in the trunk of a car. Some noteworthy ideas were using heated metal dowels to dry the towel, using centrifugal force to dry the towel as a bathing suit dryer does and flying the towel from the outside of the car. These ideas didn’t quite make it past the drawing stage as they were either too inefficient or too complicated to withstand the wear of operating in the trunk of a car. Finally, we came to the idea of an apparatus that maximizes the exposed surface area of the towel and increases airflow by including a fan. When we came up with this idea, we originally built a prototype that was centered around draping the towel around a circular frame that we used the laser-cutter to create. We propped the circle up on 1½ foot tall feet and hoped to incorporate a fan. Before pursuing the incorporation of fan we asked some students and teachers to use what we had created so far. We noticed that they seemed to struggle with draping the towel on the frame and thought it was difficult as well as inconvenient.
Building off of this observation, we decided to draw up a new prototype. After some brainstorming, we thought about folding the towel at an angle that integrated our ideas of increased airflow as well as maximum surface area. Once we knew what we wanted the structure to look like, rectangular (not circular), we experimented with how to attach the PVC pipes and mesh. We laser cut many pieces with a lot of failures which didn't work, but in the end, we laser cut two symmetrical sides to hold the 1 ¾ inch PVC pipe up high and the ½ PVC pipe lower. We cut two slots to hold the PVC pipe just enough so the ends could slide for mobility and easy use. After we had the two side pieces we hand cut the two other sides which connected the two slotted pieces. Once we had all of our pieces cut, we sanded down each piece so the PCV and/or cloth would not get snagged or caught.
Our assembly was very easy. We set the PVC pieces into the slots then wood glued and taped the pieces together. Meanwhile, we zip-tied our mesh material to the PVC skeleton to create our base and grid. Once the glue dried and we made sure everything worked, we added a fan to increase air circulation. So, we cut a circular hole in the back of the device and screwed in a fan. Then we tackled the challenge of powering the fan. We tested a battery pack which held 8 AA batteries and it was perfect. So we soldered wires to the battery and put the battery near the front so it was easy to access by the user.
In a future version of this product, we plan on optimizing the size and efficiency of our invention so that it is even easier to keep in the car and will be more efficient. We think that we could build another prototype and decrease the size by at least 25%. We would also like to incorporate more fans/stronger fans into our design to strengthen airflow and decrease dry time. Another interest we have is to eliminate the battery by extracting energy from the car battery or possibly tapping into the car’s air intake system that is used to cool the engine in order to power our fan(s) as the car moves.