Inspiration
Being a largely international group, we all had experience with subpar airport toilets. We were inspired by Bill Gates in improving and reinventing something that is so widely, almost blindly accepted: toilets.
What it does
Elavo means “clean” in Latin — but in English it means that public toilets never need to be dirty again. Elavo is an innovative self-cleaning toilet seat that lets people sit down on a clean, spotless toilet in airport facilities. Thanks to Elavo, the toilet seat is free of all dirt and bodily waste. The toilet seat has a rail system around the outside with a cleaning carriage that goes forwards and back around the toilet seat, cleaning the seat with a flushable disinfectant wet wipe that is dropped into the toilet. The user walks in; if they notice the toilet seat is dirty, they can just swipe their hand near Elavo, and the toilet seat is cleaned in under 10 seconds.
How we built it
Our final design would've had an 8020-style rail lip embedded inside the outside of the toilet seat, and the cleaning carriage would've had roaller-coaster-like wheels attached to the rail to carry it along (see images for 3D renders). However, this was unfeasible with our technological and tooling constraints, so we instead opted for quite a novel rail system using a tape measure that is pushed through the 3D-printed rail thanks to a continuous servo. The cleaning carriage carries its own servo which rotates a wet wipe back and forth.
Challenges we ran into
Even though this novel rail system seemed more feasible than the final design, we were unfortunately still hampered by our technological limitations. The continuous servo wasn't powerful enough to push the tape measure through the curves, and since we had access to only smaller 3D printers we had to print the rail system in many parts and glue them together, meaning that the tape measure would get caught in between the parts.
What's next for Team 04 - Elavo
We cold emailed over 30 airport facilities managers and industry experts, and it turns out there is quite significant interest in a product such as Elavo for airports all around the country, especially in the current context of understaffing and rising price of labor. So, there is a good possibility that one or multiple of us could actually build the final product and bring it to market.
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