I spent last week end at a cool place 150 kms from Mumbai at Sasawane, a coastal village near Alibagh. Beautiful seashores and lush green surroundings refreshed me ahead of a taxing week. I have a habit of taking a long walk through such villages and try & converse with the local people there and understand the way they live their life. It’s something I must say I love to do.
This time while on one such exploration, my attention was drawn to bathing beauties; don’t get excited, I am talking of bunch of buffaloes, getting them bathed at the hands of an old man. He had a job on his hand to get them bath quickly so that he can proceed with his next tasks and RELAX. The quantity of water to wash a buffalo is at least 5-6 times more than what you & I require (if at all we are serious about taking a bath, while on such a leisure jaunt) and if you have 25 such buffaloes then you have 150 buckets to be pulled out of a well. The job the old man was trying to do was to take out water from the well in the quickest possible time. What is a better option to do it. Simple, you may say, put an electric pump. Well that’s a good option, but continuous electric supply is a distant dream in such villages and certainly not acceptable to the frugal rural mind (and rightly so, this region is resource conscious and the word ‘abundance’ is missing from their dictionary, therefore here we stand a good chance to capture many innovations , because innovation means resource minimum result maximum)
I saw an idea whether I can reverse engineer it & see whether contradiction matrix can work for this problem. (Reverse engineering is a good way to learn TRIZ application). The Contradiction here is that the old man wants to take out the water speedily, but in so doing need to put lot of hard work if he uses conventional water wheel. Let us see whether we can formulate a contradiction.
If we map this problem in a problem hierarchy explorer then the initial problem seems to be of productivity (number of buckets filled up in a unit time), what’s stopping us from achieving the productivity is the speed with which the water is removed, therefore the parameter to be improved is speed, what’s limiting him to achieve the desired speed, is the force he need to apply or can apply. Therefore the contradiction is
Improving Parameter: Speed ( 14) Worsening Parameter: Force (15)
The inventive principles used by the other inventors when faced with similar problems are
• 19 - Periodic action
• 13- The Other Way Round
• 15 – Dynamics
• 28 – Mechanical Substitution
• 29 – Pneumatics and Hydraulics
• 03 – Local Quality
• 18 – Mechanical Vibration
• 05 – Merging
• 17- The another dimension
The conventional arrangement is as shown in figure 1. Figure 2 shows the use of lever principle which uses principles like other way round (instead of pulling the bucket push the bucket, less effort required easy to do, dead weight at the other end gets the filled bucket up), Dynamics ( Fixed Part, Movable Part), the action is periodic instead of continuous ( principle 19), the return speed is fast as the dead weight ( tied at the other end) lifts the water filled bucket speedily. (Did you experience a jolt when the person at the opposite end suddenly took himself off from the sea-saw). The dead weight has natural stopper (ground) you must have yourself experienced this stopper after having landed on the ground.
One can use electric pump (Mechanical Substitution Principle 28, use of electric field, further use of solar energy to power your pump). But I am thinking of Ideality, can buffaloes bath themselves, may be Persian wheel looks to be a good option, they get themselves bathed while they rotate the wheel. . Can you think how we can make design such an arrangement? Let us help the old man & let bathing beauties help themselves. (Photo next page)
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