A design inspired by a beetle and built to help grow crops in drought-stricken areas has won the 2011 International Dyson Award.
The Airdrop was created by Australian Edward Linacre from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, who was inspired to act after his country's worst drought in a century.
He turned to nature for design ideas and came across the Namib beetle, which lives in the Namibian desert, where there is just 13mm of rain per year. The beetle survives by collecting dew on the hydrophilic skin of its back, which it then consumes.
The designer explains: "Even arid areas like the Negev desert, Israel, have average relative air humidity of 64 percent -- in every cubic meter of air there are 11.5 millilitres of water that can be harvested. So I looked for an appropriate way of extracting it."
The Airdrop builds upon this concept by pumping air through a network of underground pipes. It cools enough underground to condense and is then delivered directly to the root of the plants.
The main advantage of the Airdrop is that this process needs no electricity, says Linacre.
After creating "numerous prototypes", Linacre has settled on a final design and will use his £10,000 prize to develop and test the Airdrop. Linacre's university department was also awarded £10,000.
Among the runners-up was Michael Korn who won the UK competition with his portable and retractable room divider, KwickScreen. An aide called Blindspot for helping the visually handicapped travel around unfamiliar surrounding using geographically-based social apps was also a runner-up. It was designed by Se Lui Chew from the National University of Singapore.
Highly commended was Amo Arm -- a prosthetic designed by Michal Prywata from Ryerson University in Canada "to overcome the invasive muscle re-innervation surgery required for amputees".
All of the entries for this year's competition are on the James Dyson Award website.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
