Designing a better hair straightener

The Simply Straight Hair Brush was designed and built. The aim of the Simply Straight Hair Brush was to straighten hair faster and better than any product currently on the market. The current products were studied and the idea for a hair brush with heated bristles was developed. A product and patent search revealed that no idea similar to this existed. An experiment was performed to determine the relationship between tension, heat, and straightness. A design was formulated. Several heat transfer analyses were performed on this design. A prototype was built and tested for safety. The brush was then tested on several subjects resulting in significantly straighter hair. However, there was still room for improvement. The second iteration should have an optimized bristle configuration. It should also use a plastic with a higher maximum operating temperature so that the brush can be hotter. A third improvement would be putting in a temperature switch instead of relying on equilibrium for temperature control.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Read, Melissa B. (Melissa Beth), 1982-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Alexander Slocum.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/32779

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/32779