TRIZ Challenge - July 2002
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By: Ian Care
We challenge you to use your TRIZ skills and your knowledge to help solve a
humanitarian or social problem. We hope that you will submit your results for
publication in the TRIZ journal. Every few months we will set a new challenge -
but that does not mean that you cannot continue to work on previous challenges,
indeed you may have chosen to work on this for your project or coursework.
Send your results, ideas, comments and suggestions for future challenges to
challenge@triz-journal.com
This month's challenge is an engineering challenge with a humanitarian
aspect. How can you make a pump to draw water from a well or river in a
developing country (such as Uganda) for next to no cost using local materials?
By solving the access to water problem, people are not forced to drink dirty
polluted water and because they can draw water for irrigation there is food to
feed the family (and maybe some extra to sell). Gasoline powered pumps are out
of the financial reach of subsistence farmers, never mind the continued cost of
the fuel to run them. Electric pumps are cheaper but again if power is available
the farmer cannot afford it. Then there would be the need to keep it secure. In
places like Kenya, the water table lies below the reach of simple pumps being
around 20 feet below the surface.
The challenge is to design a pump that can be built from materials obtained
in the developing world that can pump up to 60 feet head of water and can be
easily operated by either: available resource such as wind; 50 Kg (110lb) human
possibly wearing a long skirt; a domestic animal. It should be capable of a flow
rate of around 0.42 litres (US quarts) per second to irrigate an acre a day. The
pump needs to be easily transportable, so if bought in the local market can be
transported home by a mini-bus or jeep containing over 30 people.
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There are hundreds of designs from years ago, but none that can be made
cheaply and are easily transportable. Recently the UK charity Actionaid, the US
charity Approtec and Stanford University are all looking at this problem and
have come up with suggested solutions - all of which have features that could be
improved. Look at their web sites and see how they have used old raincoats, bits
of PVC tubes, knotted ropes to make cheap prototypes.
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