PHS Engineering

Toilets! We use them all the time, yet they are not a common subject of conversation. For the PHS Young Engineers however we really learnt to appreciate them! No, it’s not as bad as it sounds. We had been entered to take part in an engineering challenge organised by EngineerAid, an international charity which provides remote engineering solutions in economically developing countries through the use of the Internet as a medium of communication and a knowledge transfer system. Our challenge was to build a transportable, flushing toilet for a refugee camp in an African country where civil war had broken out. We were to try and use recycled materials which may be available in this location and our design should be easy for locals to reconstruct to make more toilets in the camp.

After too many toilet jokes everyone began to understand the complex problem which we had to solve. The design brief had suggested building the toilet over eight days, due to school work and TV appearances we only had four hours to finish (and start!) building our design. A quick google search surprised us as we found that there is an existing competitive market for portable models, designed primarily for camping, on sale in the UK. Taking onboard this newfound inspiration we came up with a design that was, well, completely different to anything we had seen! Our design was in some ways extremely simple. Materials used were as basic as we could find. The main structure was two buckets (one upturned, with the other on top), a hole was made in the top bucket, ok we could have used a drill for this model, but we thought we would really get into the spirit of the competition and make our design from scratch with no power tools! Instead we used a knife, heated until flaming, to simply melt a hole through the bucket. A pipe, made from three old plastic water bottles, fitted perfectly through this. In the top bucket we placed a plastic bag with a hole cut in the corner, this corner fed into the neck of the bottle pipe. We had propped up the bag inside the bucket with some stones, in the refuge camp this could be done with stones, leaves or sticks, basically any material that is available. This shaped bag directed waste into the bottle pipe which led to the supplied collecting tank. The only problem we had left to solve was the flush. Keep it simple. That soon became our motto within the group, so we did. The flush entered the toilet bowl (bucket) through the top half of a bottle; this was attached to some old tubing which fitted onto a sealed plastic container. To flush all you had to do was lift the container, the stronger the flush you needed the higher you hold the container. To add some comfort to the toilet we built a wooden seat, sanded thoroughly to make sure nobody would end up with splinters! This challenge really did make the team try to overcome any potential problems.

On the day of the competition our toilet was put through many tests. We had collapsed the design into a box less than 0.5 x 0.5 x 1.0m, the box was weighed and then passed through a size tester, a bit like a luggage limit tester you might see at an airport. These tests ensured that our toilet could be easily transported around the world. All the features of the toilet were tested in the next challenge. To enable the toilets to fit in their transportable boxes parts of each toilet had been dissembled. The teams were all given two hours to reconstruct their toilets to a usable state. The added stress of a time limit pushed our team to the limits, but, with hard work and determination our working model was assembled with just one hour and fifty five minutes to spare! We left the University teams hammering away at their pieces of wood and went off to explore the rest of the campus for a bit. When we came back we presented our design to the judges, which included special guest Dr Bunhead from Brainiac. We were delighted that Dr Bunhead thought our design was very comfortable! Then our toilet flushed away mini mars bars and ground coffee beans with water to spare, giving it the added advantage of being water efficient in a very hot country.

Despite all our hard work we never really thought that being the only High School Team we stood a chance against University Engineers. Each team had really used their imagination and all the toilets offered good solutions to the given problem. We had a chance to speak to other teams about their designs; my favourite story was how one of the teams had been walking around Glasgow with a hammer, screwdriver and knife as they were searching for junk to use for their design. Only problem was they were stopped by the police who didn’t appreciate the excuse that the team were carrying dangerous weapons because they were trying to design a toilet for a refugee camp! All in all it was a great day, it was even better as the judges had been so impressed with our simple design that we won the competition! We now have a toilet seat shaped trophy to add to the schools trophy cabinet.

I must admit though when I got a text on the day asking me what I was up to I had to answer “Not much” although we are all now so used to talking toilets I don’t think the rest of the world is quite ready for it just yet!

EngineerAid Scrapyard Scramble 09