MECHANICAL DESIGN AND FEASIBILITY STUDY OF AN AUTOMATED DRAIN CLEANING SYSTEM FOR URBAN DRAINS IN SHAH ALAM, MALAYSIA

Abstract

Clogged drains in rapidly urbanizing cities such as Shah Alam increase flood and health risks, while labour-intensive manual cleaning demands safer automated solutions. To address these challenges, this study presents the design and development of an Automated Drain Cleaning System (ADCS) for Malaysian open-drain profiles. The system employs a dual-slider mechanism in which Slider 1 uses a mesh gate to intercept debris and Slider 2 consists of a bin which can be lifted and deposits the accumulated debris into a collection bin. An ESP32 is used to control the ADCS system in which the cleaning schedules three cycles a day. A 12 V winch provides actuation for the bin and mesh gate. A solar battery is attached to ADCS system to enable off-grid operation. To evaluate the feasibility of the structural design, a CAD model was created in Autodesk Inventor 2023 which later structural analysis was evaluated in Altair SimSolid under representative loads to verify strength and stiffness before actual fabrication. The study applied distributed load of 1000 N to represent about 100 kg of debris on the mesh gate in Slider 1 and downward load on the bin in Slider 2.  The results show Slider 1 experiences maximum of 20.71 MPa of von Mises stress with 1.05 mm maximum displacement, while Slider 2 experiences 170 MPa with very small displacement ranging from −0.33 to 0.07 mm which both satisfy the yield strength of the S235 mild steel. Future work will include field testing and integration of IoT for monitoring and remote control.