Watching friends’ homes and his university go under the 2011 floodwater has led mechanical engineer Richard Brown to develop a new low-cost water flow device.

July 18, 2018

It was the chaos caused by the 2011 Brisbane flood and watching his friends’ homes go under that made mechanical engineer Richard Brown realise there must be a better way to measure the rising water.

The Queensland University of Technology professor of mechanical engineering says when the flood-hit he was not only helping friends evacuate, he also watched the campus become submerged.

Realising it was a once in a generation event, Professor Brown set out to collect data on the flood but soon realised with power cut across the city and access blocked due to the danger posed by the water, it was a near-impossible task.

It led Prof Brown and his colleagues to look for another way to measure the rising water. 

Their research has resulted in an Australian first named the Drifter, a low-cost portable floating computer housed in a PVC pipe that can be dropped from a helicopter.

The units which can cost as little as $100 provide real-time data on the speed and depth of the water, along with the location of the unit.

“If it’s floating in a flood, it’s location will be changing pretty quickly and according to the change we can understand a lot about what’s happening,” he said.

Prof Brown said if the Drifters had been deployed during the 2011 flood, authorities would have been able to access data across a broader area than that supplied by the limited number of fixed-point gauging stations currently in use.

The Drifters would have enabled responders to formulate more localised and accurate plans.

“Rainfall is quite variable, some areas get high rainfall while only a few kilometres away the rainfall is much lower and we can’t really predict that accurately with the meteorological tools we have at the moment,” he said.

Drifters are currently undergoing field trials with the Sunshine Coast Council at Lake Currimundi and Pumicestone Passage under an ARC Linkage grant.