Last march I participated in a 36 hour engineering challenge organized by VPDelta in the harbor of Rotterdam. The challenges was to build a floating platform with the main purpose of urban poor residential usage, full scale size 6m x 6m, maximum costs of construction €5000. Together with Priska Prasetya, team “RUBIRU” used beer and balloons as a source of inspiration and we ended up with a very colorful, and by some miracle, floating platform.
The goal of the challenge was to improve the knowledge about floating construction in order to help slums that are constantly threatened by floods. The main challenge is not to build something that floats, but something that is affordable for the urban poor. Our design should be able to be implemented in Indonesia, with a minimum of imported materials.
The design
Rubber and bamboo
Our idea was to use rubber to make a series of differently shaped balloons. We chose rubber for a variety of reasons, it can be locally produced, thereby the local economy is stimulated, it is reasonably sustainable, it is cheap, the production process is basic and it is very practical. The balloons will be equipped with a valve, in this way the balloons can be pumped up using a normal pump for bike or scooter tires. And if the rubber has a leak it can be fixed in the same way as with a bike or scooter tire, no need to throw the balloon away! Using this material a local balloon manufacturing company can be established, as well as a distribution and repair shop.
The balloons can be installed under existing houses using a bamboo cage structure, as well as in newly build houses. Furthermore it is possible to have the balloons installed permanently for houses located on the water year-round, or only inflate them in times when floods are expected.
All shapes and sizes
The balloons will be designed in different shapes and sizes to fit different types of housing. A series of balloons will be installed per household to divide the floating capacity, in case of balloon damage enough capacity will should be left to prevent the platform from sinking completely.
The prototype – learning from failure!
During the weekend we spend a significant amount of time trying to glue rubber and make it airtight. This turned out to be more challenging then we initially hoped in the given time frame and we were unsuccessful in building a functioning prototype. When this became clear we decide to make 2 prototypes, one non-functioning but according to the design, and one floating item to demonstrate we were capably of making something float, which was going to be a happy and colorful, build-as-you-go bamboo-balloon thingemy to celebrate all the awesome teams and ideas and the corporation between Indonesia (Priska) en the Netherlands (Natasja). The other ideas and the winner of the challenge are shown in this clip, our idea starts at 10:38.
It was a great weekend, we learned a lot and had a lot of fun. Although we were not able to provide proof of principle, I believe the rubber and bamboo concept might actually be very suitable in practice, feel free to try it out! If you do, give us a call. Payments can be made in beers ;)