My team and I were tasked to design a windshield cleaning system for the Etricity e-trike. we worked together with Etricity and the Hague university of applied science to design a solution that suits a futuristic vehicle such as this one.
The system is designed to have a small footprint on the windshield of the car, making sure it is as invisible as possible. The geometry of the arms is designed such that the blade covers 93% of the entire windshield. The arms are driven by two 25Nm motors precisely controlling the motion of the arms.
The material decisions in this project were made based on weight and strength mostly. These two properties we considered to be the most important. Weight is crucial because we want to require as little force as possible to move the wiper and using light materials helps this. Strength is also very important to us as the parts are under a significant amount of load during cycles. This is why we chose carbon fiber and aluminum for the rods to ensure performance under load while weighing the absolute minimum.
