Tinkering scientists on tour

With a bus full of self-built, McGyver-like equipment for giving demonstrations, Delft hydrologists have departed for Vienna. On the way back they’ll sample the Rhine.

There is barely room left to sit in Rolf Hut’s office at the faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences. Hut (MSc), an experimentally orientated hydrologist, points out the various instruments and explains what they’re used for –  a wave basin to demonstrate Microsoft Kinect’s applicability as a wave detection device; a wooden windtunnel with a temperature sensor immune to direct radiation; and a perforated rain-pipe that functions like a large-surface rain meter. The more rain that has fallen, the higher the water sprays out of the sides of the perforated pipe.

Home-built equipment is a bit of a Delft passion, Hut admits, with a preference for using devices that were never meant to be used in such a way, like the 0.20 cent microphone that detects rain by recording the sound of it. “Unintended use of measure equipment,” he calls it, and this is also the title of the lecture and demonstration he and his colleagues from hydrology and water resources management will present at the annual assembly of the European Geophysical Union this week in Vienna. Hut hopes that their ‘McGyver style’ equipment, featuring lots of tie wraps and duct tape will catch on among other groups as well.

A perforated rain-pipe for example may sound cranky, but it makes good sense to measure rainfall over an extended area. “Instrument makers understandably strive to make their products as precise as possible,” he says, “but the quantity of rain varies strongly from one place to the next. We prefer to measure with lower precision over a larger area.”

On the return journey from Vienna Hut and a colleague will take samples of Rhine river water every 20 kilometres or so. With a stainless steel bucket they’ll be sampling for remnants of medicines. They expect the load of anti-depressive and ibuprofen to increase with every major city they pass. In fact, they want to test drug remnants as an indicator of human civilisation along the banks.

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