Students use skills to innovate and irrigate

Pumped-up students from Sheffield Hallam University have been using their skills to help an environmental charity.

A group of second year energy and sustainability students have designed and built irrigation systems to help staff at the Idle Valley Ecominds project.

The challenge was to come up with systems that can pump water from a small lake into water butts, in order to irrigate a nursery garden that is being developed on the site. 

Two systems have been selected from the second-year students' proposals, one involving a wind-powered pump built out of old oil-drums and the other using a pump powered by a recycled bicycle.

The two chosen systems, which are built entirely from scrap materials and are environmentally sustainable, will be tested for their efficiency in delivering water with the potential of installing them permanently at the site.

The Ecominds project is a £7.5 million outdoor initiative promoting mental health through outdoor activities, run by the mental health charity Mind on behalf of the BIG Lottery Fund. 

"I'm really pleased with our design and I hope it will make it easier for those involved in the project to redirect water to the areas that need it." 

Ecominds is run from the Idle Valley Nature Reserve, on the outskirts of Retford, a 450 hectare former gravel extraction site which is now being restored to wetland habitat, mixed grassland and woodland.

Student Rob Lancaster said: "It's been a challenge working on a real-life project like this, especially as we had to use salvaged materials to create the systems.

"I'm really pleased with our design and I hope it will make it easier for those involved in the project to redirect water to the areas that need it."

For press information: contact Tess Humphrys on 0114 225 4025 or email pressoffice@shu.ac.uk