The whole group came up with five solutions then each person chose one. I am in the water pump group. Hurracaines are caused by if the water on the surface of the ocean is 25.6 degrees or hotter. What our wave-powered pump does is it lifts the cold water onto the surface whenever a wave goes by. We did some research and someone already had an idea to solve this problem and we are comparing our idea with his idea to see which one works better.

The past two days the hurricane group has been doing a lot of research. The first day was mostly a lot of Eric talk and learning about climate change and how it has affected the world. Everyone was going to research a topic to learn more about the causes, effects and consequences. This research took up a lot of the morning time especially talking with other members in the Holecene 911 studio. In the afternoon our main goal was to find how we could make learning about climate fun; turning a boring topic into a fun project. In the ended we ended up defining fun.
The morning of the second day the entire studio brainstormed ideas of projects we could do for each climate change project. I chose to solve a problem for the topic “Hurricanes Intensifying.” We had a lot to learn before we could start thinking about our product. Our goal is to find a way to mix warm and cold water together to prevent hurricanes from intensifying. A lot of our research was finding numbers and basic information about hurricanes, focusing mainly on Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. We needed to find how deep and shallow the Gulf of Mexico is and find the different temperatures. Finding the temperatures was hard because a lot of the graphs and maps we found were the surface area temperatures. Another thing we needed to look at was what others people’s solutions were. The two ideas we thought of were a pump that had doors at the top and bottom to mix the cold and warm water together and a drain that would mix together. At the end of the day we started to build a small prototype.

Kate had designed a large cone shaped diverter, but when we tried pumping water with it attached not enough water got out and it was too heavy. We wanted to design a device that spread the water out equally when it exited the top. We cut off the bottom of the old diverter making a very small cone, which we attached to the top with a wire.

I worked on Adobe Illustrator to make a logo for our pump which we are calling PumpIT. We also worked on our presentation, adding images and simplyifying the slides.

Today we started working on our actual projects. With a spectacular device in mind, Jess, Kate, Max and I sketched, and started prototyping our ocean surface pump. Jess and I found a plastic pipe about one inch thick and used the wire cutter to cut a circular foam float fitting around the pipe at the top and potentially keeping it afloat. We did not push the pipe all the way up to the top of the hole and additionally carved out some space in the top of the foam to have room for water to be pumped. Tomorrow we will think about the flaps or doors that allow the cold water to come up through the bottom and not down through the top, cut down the pipe to an apropriate length, and cut down the foam enough to keep the pipe afloat. 

We have redesigned our pump yet again. We now have a much better sense of what we need to accomplish for our pump, after going through the simulations. Our design is now closer to our first design with all the one-way valves.  The tricky thing about our pump is we really want it to be wave powered. We are determined to make it wave powered.