A new safety device intended to prevent workers getting trapped underwater has been named as winner of the Irish division of the James Dyson Awards.
HydroFLOcean was designed by a team of eight engineering students from Cork Institute of Technology, following the deaths of two men in Limerick last year.
The two workers, TJ O’Herlihy and Bryan Whelan, drowned after the platform on which they were working collapsed while they were carrying out maintenance work on Thomond Bridge. The men were attached to the platform when it was submerged in the water.
The HydroFLOcean safety device is attached to the workman’s harness and the safety cable on the maintenance platform, and separates the user from the platform when it is submerged in water, using an inflation device commonly employed in life jackets.
Gas canister
A gas canister inside the harness is activated when the harness is submerged in water, forcing out a stainless steel pin that connects the device and causing the harness to split in two. That separates the worker from the platform.
Mr Coughlan, along with Shane O’Driscoll, Gerard O’Connell, Kelly Lane, George O’Rourke, John Harrington, Jason Shorten and Kacey Mealy created a working prototype of the device and it has been rigorously tested.
The students will now compete with international winners of the Dyson awards, going up against 22 different countries for a grand prize of €35,000. The top 20 international finalists will be announced on September 29th and the global winner will be picked by James Dyson, and revealed on October 27th.
The HydroFLOcean team is joined by four other Irish student inventions on the shortlist, including the OmniDryer clothes dryer that mimics a tumble dryer but uses 60 times less electricity; the SI personal alert and emergency alarm watch; the Orb induction mobile-phone charger; and the Infinite Charge, a gyroscopic, portable energy-harvesting charger.
