Desenvolvimento do projeto e protótipo de um sanitário autolimpante para gatos domésticos

Abstract

All cats have the habit of burying their excrements and, with the domestication, a toilet was introduced for domestic cats, popularly known as litter box. Its cleaning process is manual and necessary, with a frequency of at least once a day, to avoid cat stress, elimination in inappropriate places and bad odor. The objective of the present work is to design and manufacture a prototype of a toilet that will perform the cleaning cycle automatically after the use by the cat, using Pahl & Beitz methodology for the development. For this, it was examined the cat’s behavior, cat’s elimination habits and the pet market characterization related to the toilet and the granulates. With that, it was produced a benchmarking and a patent searching of self-cleaning toilets. Through a questionnaire, the client needs were listed to elaborate the design requirements and the product specification. Eight preliminary concepts were sketched based on a morphologic matrix and, from a relative matrix, the solution with the highest potential was chosen. The preliminary project was then developed with the definition and detailing of the components. A proof-of-concept prototype was manufactured to test the waste separation process, concluding that the concept was effective and achieved the proposed objective. Since a proof-of-concept prototype was used for testing, not all project requirements were validated.