Industrial design to save lives
Date posted: 15 Dec 2011
Ed Linacre
BDes(Indust Design)(Hons) 2010
The ingenuity of the Swinburne industrial design graduate in developing the promising new irrigation-by-condensation technique, earned him the 2011 James Dyson Award, which came with a $16,500 prize for Ed, and a further $16,500 for Swinburne.
Ed’s Airdrop Irrigation system – developed during his honours year in the Faculty of Design after an arduous internship in a top German design firm – has captured the attention of some of the world’s top designers and commercial developers in the US, Asia and the Middle East.
A newspaper article highlighting weekly farmer suicides was the inspiration for the project. But a conversation with a struggling Mildura orange farmer zeroed Linacre in on the blight of precious water escaping into the atmosphere from drying agricultural soils.
Ed credits his Swinburne training with providing the rigour underpinning the design.
“One of the subjects in my honours year was a class just on research methods and techniques and ways to thoroughly dive into your topic. It’s a 10,000 word thesis with proper referencing which is a challenge for an industrial design student, but that gave me a really solid basis for proper product development,” he said.
From his research, he found water vapour was so abundant in the atmosphere it plays a vital role in trapping the heat necessary for life on Earth, but it was evaporating from the soil where it was needed by farmers to grow crops.
After experiments trying to capture water with big canopies over plants, he looked to the deep past where tribesmen would cool their huts with small underground tunnels.
“They were using the soil underground to cool the air, but water was also produced as well and they had to create catchments so I thought, ‘there it was.’”
Initial experiments with highly temperature conductive copper piping to condense water vapour from the air weren’t successful until copper wool was inserted to maximise the condensation area.
A small wind-turbine collects the condensed water in an underground trap, and solar energy is used to pump the water directly to plant roots. The prototype system can already deliver up to a litre of water per day depending upon prevailing atmospheric humidity.
Ed credits Swinburne’s Mark Strachan and Simon Jackson as ‘phenomenal and inspirational’ teachers, and his Swinburne-organised student exchange to German university, Hawk HF, for his philosophy of meticulous and research-driven product development.
Ed graduated with his Bachelor of Design (Industrial Design) (Hons) in 2010.
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