Lal Kushwaha has spent his life building and improving machines that
put things in the soil, but lately he has been tinkering with a
contraption that blows stuff out of the ground.
Kushwaha is an agricultural engineering professor at the University of
Saskatchewan. For almost 40 years he has been working on projects like
creating proper ballasting and traction for seeding and tillage
machines.
Now he has a new challenge – one with international humanitarian
consequences.
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His client is Canada’s department of national defence.
His job is to find a better way to explode hidden landmines, which maim
and kill 26,000 people a year in countries like Afghanistan, Bosnia and
Cambodia.
Two years ago he was approached by the federal government to work on a
mechanical device to trigger unexploded mines. The department of
national defence had built a prototype for that purpose but it wasn’t
working well.
It turned to Kushwaha, an expert in soil-machine interaction, who was
able to make the “rotary impacting device” simulate the force of a
human walking across the ground.
There are three classes of landmines – tank mines, vehicle mines and
anti-personnel mines. The latter are pressure-activated mines that are
set off by the weight of unsuspecting humans.
Anti-personnel mines are buried up to a depth of 10 centimetres, but
Kushwaha wanted to create a device that would trigger them even if they
were 15 cm into the soil, just to be on the safe side.
The plan is for the rotary impacting device to be attached to the front
of a remote control vehicle that will be driven through a mine field.
The machine flails out strings of flexible metal links in front of the
vehicle that slap the ground with enough force to set off the mines.
Similar machines have been developed that use chains instead of metal
links to beat the ground, but Kushwaha thinks the device he helped
create will be “ahead of the pack” in terms of technological
advancements.
“Those chains are not completely foolproof devices and we wanted
something foolproof. What this device is doing is impacting every inch
of the ground.”
Chains sometimes leave fragments or whole mines intact that can be
triggered, killing or injuring the people trying to prevent that type
of tragedy from happening.
“Those chain things have not been researched. They just put something
together,” said Kushwaha.
His machine was tested successfully on dummy mines provided by the
defence department, which have the same triggering device as
anti-personnel mines but no charge attached to them.
The professor is confident he has fixed the problem with the device,
but the government still wants to test it at its Defence Research
Establishment facility in Suffield, Alta. Those tests were supposed to
happen last summer but have been delayed until this June. Kushwaha
finds that frustrating, but understandable.
“We are dealing with government people here.”
He said the project is now in the hands of the department, which has to
test and commercialize the product before it can be put to use defusing
some of the estimated 100 million buried landmines scattered over more
than 60 countries.
In the meantime, Kushwaha has been awarded $605,000 in federal funding
to continue his landmine research for another five years. The goal is
to develop efficient and cost-effective machines for clearing mines.
The department of national defence has also committed to transfer its
large soil bin from Suffield to the University of Saskatchewan and to
provide $150,000 in funding to install and upgrade the gigantic
“sandbox” once the university finds a building to house it.
The funding and new equipment will make the university an international
centre for landmine research. It should also help the facility develop
better machines for farmers, said Kushwaha.
The university has a small soil bin that measures 21 metres long by 1.4
m wide, where scientists conduct tests using a tractor that is
one-quarter the size of a regular machine. The new large sandbox will
allow researchers to use regular tractor tires and should lead to
better results.
When he reflects on the two types of research he is co-ordinating,
Kushwaha said there are obvious differences. Working on agricultural
machines is not a perfect science. Working on landmine clearing devices
definitely is.
“Here there is no room for error, so this is more challenging. You have
to be perfect. There is somebody working behind that machine, you don’t
really want to get them hurt.”
He said the landmine research could attract international attention the
same way the much touted national synchrotron light source facility
has, but with much less investment. And the payback on that investment
will come in many forms.
“We feel privileged to work for this humanitarian cause.”
