Mendel Skulski, BID/12, in running for James Dyson Award

Mendel Skulski, BID/12,  is one of three Canadian inventors on the top 50 list of international candidates to win the James Dyson Award. Open to university students and recent graduates from 18 countries, the annual award recognizes one budding inventor with a £10,000 prize.

Skulski’s Out of Thin Air water harvesting device is designed as a more efficient use of relief effort cargo space. Leveraging Miura-Ori origami, a flexible bladder reservoir and a collapsible frame, the OOTA can be packed into an approximately .5m3 box, or about the same space two days worth of water for 15 people would occupy. Once assembled, however, the device can produce approximately 225 litres of clean drinking water per day, given ample humidity levels. To harvest moisture, the OOTA uses cleverly folded sheets of a polymer modeled on the fog-basking Namibian desert beetle, and anodized aluminum foil for radiative cooling.

Chosen from among more than 700 inventions from 18 countries, the successful entries will now progress to the international final before the winner is announced on November 8, 2012.

(Text excerpted from http://www.canadianmanufacturing.com/design-engineering/news/canadian-inventors-short-listed-for-dysonaward-
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