An Automatic Sliding Door: Leveraging Locally Sourced Materials for Innovation

A door is an essential component of a building. It provides security and access to the different parts of a building. In the modern era, when people want everyday life to be completely automated so that work can be done easily in a short amount of time without wasting energy, automatic doors have continued to be fashionable. In addition to being effective and efficient as automation continues to develop rapidly, automatic doors are essential to curbing the transmission of infectious diseases like Ebola and COVID-19. While automatic doors are available in Nigeria, they are imported, thereby shrinking the nation’s foreign exchange. Not only that, but they also cost more when imported compared to when they are manufactured locally. In this work, therefore, a cost-effective automatic sliding door was developed using locally sourced materials from Nigeria. The door uses a passive infrared sensor (PIR) to detect a human or an object in a doorway and automatically opens and closes the door by signalling a microcontroller to activate a DC motor, which drives a belt pulley mechanism. The conceptual design of the system was designed and simulated using SolidWorks. Based on the design, calculations were made to determine the appropriate materials to source. The DC motor model was simulated using MATLAB SIMULINK as a physical model to observe how it would behave in the presence of noise, and the PID controller was tuned to give optimal performance using MATLAB Auto tuning. Some materials were locally purchased, while others were constructed through standard workshop methods. A cost-saving advantage of 95.77% and 89.13% were achieved when compared to imported equivalent types from the USA and China, respectively. The siding door was assembled and subjected to a functionality test, and it was observed that the automatic sliding door successfully detects humans and objects and actuates the motor to open and close the door after the object is out of the set sensing range of 50cm. This work is a step forward in boosting local innovation in Nigeria.