Aeronautical Engineering applied to down-to-earth solutions (literally)
Starting from a fanciful idea of “Why not explore using the ‘Singapore Flyer’ to grow crops?”, a team of final-year Diploma in Aeronautical Engineering (DARE) Students devised and built the Urban Farming Kit. With the goals of making farming fun and accessible to even children and the elderly, the Urban Farming Kit resembles a Ferris wheel that has multiple tiers of pot holders, allowing more plants to be grown in a given space. It will rotate on its own and can be paused by the user when a planting tier is at a comfortable height to work with. An automatic irrigation system completes the kit.
Kampung Senang Charity and Education Foundation, which has a MOU with SP, has shown interest in the invention and it will be in use at one of Kampung Senang’s centres in May this year.
The project’s supervisor Mr Soh Kim Fai spoke to Humans at SP about his driving motivations and thoughts behind the project: that final-year projects should be social projects to help students realise the positive impact they have when applying mechanical engineering for social causes, and that empathising with the stakeholders and their needs gives the students the important emotional linkage and motivation for completing such projects.
The Urban Farming Kit is the tireless effort of DARE students (from left-to-right in photo below) Tan Gim Yeow, Tan Yi Xuan, Chua Yong Chuan (the team leader), and Louis Szeto Hao Xuan.
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