Abstract Working adults and university students find it difficult to complete their laundry in a day because of the unpredictable weather conditions in the tropics of West Africa. There are existing drying machines, but these machines are either not smart or they are hard to install and maintain and they cause easy damage to the clothes. In comparison to the United States where electric drying is mostly used, about 16 billion kW is consumed per year or 5.8% of the whole resident electricity consumption. Equating this electricity consumption rate to that of West Africa, it will be very expensive for an average student or working adult to afford. This capstone project presents the design and prototype fabrication of automatic retractable clothes drying rack that facilitates the drying of clothes in highly humid and rainy environments. The automatic retractable clothes drying rack is divided into four parts: The drying rack frame, the linear actuator, sensors, and motor controls, and the cover curtain mechanism. The drying rack frame is a scissors-like mechanism, that releases and exposes the clothes based on the weather conditions of the environment. This paper entails the processes taken in coming up with the design, the prototype implementation, the result and analysis from the prototype testing, and some suggested future work.
