INFLATER · Development of a universal flood protection tool using the force of the water to protect against floods

The flooding of rivers has always been a problem, and thanks to advances in civil engineering humans learnt of methods to keep the river in its bed. In urban areas especially, but in rural areas as well, embankments have been built to keep the river where it belongs. Unfortunately even with embankments flooding occurs as we can see it all over Europe and the World. Due to global warming flooding is becoming more and more common and the water level is getting so high that the presently built embankments cannot cope. At present people use sandbags as the main protection against flooding. The advantage of sandbags is that it is cheap and sand is widely available, but it requires a lot of manpower to fill and place the bags..The idea of this project would be to design and build a portable dam, which can be placed anywhere quickly, easily and does not require much manpower.The project would be broken down onto two main sections. The first section includes the mechanical part, which involves the design of the inflatable section. The second section involves the electrical sensor part and wireless communication.The construction consists of three parts, the floating top section and the inflatable section with a skirt secured by fixing spikes and supporting strings.. The inflatable section is connected to the skirt and secured to the grown with support strings and spikes. As the water level rises it lifts the floating part and the water is let inside the inflatable section. As the inflatable part is filled the strings go tight to support the structure.To aid the mechanical design, electrical sensors can be introduced. The sensors can be used so INFLATER can monitor itself and the river. INFLATER needs to monitor itself so it can warn if it fails or the water level gets too high It also monitors the river to help predict its behaviour and send warnings to the surrounding areas via wireless communication to help avoid a tragedy.""