Before I determined what structure and material I would use to build my project, I wrote down several requirements that this final product needs to fulfill:
- Conceptually Powerful
- Contractible / inflatable
- Easy to be produced
- Low Tech
My first thought of how I would construct the cover of the tent to be an assembly of small rectangular airbags. I identified the natural disaster I would target as flood.
However I soon found the individual airbag idea not practical and useful to the issue I tried to solve. As it takes much longer to blow up separate airbag, the procedure is also more difficult and can be really a nuisance when people are suffering after a disaster and just want to get a shelter built quickly. Then I came up with my second idea which has bigger airbags on both sides and tried to come up with a possible material for the supporting structure.
I was certain that I would use metal, and the metal would be aluminum – light weight, strong and corrosion resistant. The structure needs to be contractible, so I had several ideas that I wanted to build. I first used strut channels with nuts, washers and screws as the connecting material. However, the hinges for the strut channels only came in as steel made, and the sizes were huge and unnecessary. The twisting of the strut channel for contraction was also hard to apply, as a result, I decided to abandon strut channels and searched for an alternative.
The alternative I found to substitute for strut channel was aluminum rail. They came in with a much lighter hinge, and each of the rail was only 20mm thick with a hollow center. Therefore, I reduced the overall weight significantly. I wasn’t consider using screws and nuts for connections any more and I built the whole structure with hinges. The structure, which I tested, was very easy to be bent and contracted.
Afterwards, I attached the tent cover to the structure using hooks and adhesive velcro strips. It is only inflatable around the cover and the inflated airbags also serve as a support to stabilize the structure. When untied the velcro at the bottom of the tent, the tent flattened out to a raft, which can serve as a floating device in the water.
