Maintaining Water Supply

Growing NZ Innovation Challenge

Introduction

In DTE me, Lindley and Thamie are put in a group to find a solution for farmers which is Maintaining Water Supply which focuses on pipes. We are supposed to find a solution on pipe leaks and breaks. We have five weeks to find and make a solution on how we can help the farmers solve their problem. We learned a lot of things about the problem.

DLO

Prezi Presentation

In the last couple of weeks of the topic Growing NZ, we made a presentation in Prezi. We presented it in front of the class, explaining and giving every single detail on what the topic is and how are we going to solve the problem or challenge. Thamie and I decided that we should do the presentation while Lindley makes the script or notes.

Reflection

Why we chose Maintaining Water Supply is because that every farmer in the world has the same problems. So this problem is not just for New Zealand but it can actually have a beneficial effect on our solution. Our challenge is to create a new way for farmers to quickly identify that there is a problem and locate where it is.

Before we made a solution, we first need to choose two enablers that we can use or fix the problem. We chose Networks & Sensors and Nanotechnology. We did spend a lot of time on how are we going to make these two enablers work together so we decided to make another pipe that has a sensor that will detect the if the pipe has a leak. The farmer will be alerted that their pipes have problems.  The nanotech will then do its job to fix the leaks that the pipes have. These two enablers are compatible based on how they function.

There is a positive and a negative effect on this plan. The negative impact is that the farmers need to remove a huge amount of land and install the secondary pipes. They also need to do a map of where all the pipes are located and inserted. The positive effect on this plan is that the farmers don't need to remove a huge amount of land again and again just to find a single pipe leak.

We also have to do a prototype on how our solution would look like, so we choose to do it on Tinkercard.  

This is what our prototype looks like. The main pipe is the brown one and the sensor will go through the secondary pipe. A wire will be inserted and it will be the one that detects the pipe leaks. If a water reaches or touches the wire, it will alert the farmer that there is something wrong. The Nanotech will be installed on the sensors and it will fix the problem. We tried did have a lot of ideas on how we are going to make it and we decided in this design.

Sources

www.prezi.com

www.tinkercad.com

Questions

What design would your prototype look like?

Do you think that our ideas will work?