Like-minded young scientists and inventors from across the West Kootenays spent the weekend showing off their hard work, some of it more than a year in the making, for prizes, praise and share in each other’s successes.
The West Kootenay Regional Science Fair on Saturday turned the gym at Hutton Elementary School into an innovation think-tank as dozens of students from across the region from Grade 4 to Grade 12 showed off the progress of their various projects. Subjects ranging from agriculture to fire prevention, environmental protection, biology, geology and engineering, among others, were up for judging and viewing by parents, fellow students and family.
Hutton Principal Peter Scott, who spearheaded the effort to bring the fair to Hutton and School District 51, wasn’t sure how many students were at the fair, but there were 30 projects on display with some being partner projects, with several schools being represented.
“It’s exciting to see all these great projects from across the region and different places as it sets the bar high (for achievement). We have school projects from Nelson, Kelowna, Castlegar and School District 51,” he said. “Every year I’ve been here for the last five years I’ve been running science fairs and we’ve had about 350 kids. It made sense to run the regionals out of here as opposed to out of Nelson.”
Students set up their projects and polished their presentations before the gym was closed off for judges to speak directly to students to determine who would win awards.
Scott explained while this is a regional science fair, the participating students aren’t competing for the usual chance to go to the Canada-Wide Science Fair. This is the first year Hutton is hosting the fair, but to send students to the national fair costs thousands of dollars. Fundraising is happening now in the hopes that the school can send two students who will win the regional science fair to the national competition.
It wasn’t all competition, though. Students were split into two groups for judging, explained Scott. Those who weren’t being judged were invited to try their hand at piloting drones to stave off boredom and give the participants a fun, science-based activity.
Awards were given out after the fair, with several students receiving more than one for their projects. Sadie Bruen, 15, from Trafalgar Middle School in Nelson, presented her ongoing project on what effect fire retardant chemicals have on water supplies.
She was inspired to take on this subject while watching news footage of water bombers battling the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year.
“I was seeing the pictures of the planes dropping the fire retardant and I was thinking that’s so close to water, I wonder what effect that would have on fish and the ecosystem they live in,” she said.
She tested it by filling five buckets of the same size and volume, filling them with water from Kootenay Lake. One was a control, and the others had varying amounts of Phos-Chek LC-95 fire retardant, a commonly used chemical in fighting fires, measuring the Ph levels, nitrate concentration and ammonia levels over time. The only one that changed was ammonia, which increased.
“Higher ammonia is very harmful to fish as it’s harmful to their gills, weakens their immune system, affects their fertility and generally shortens their lifespan,” Bruen said. “Buckets two and three showed what would happen in the most common amount dropped on a fire, with buckets four and five being the worst case scenario, which hasn’t happened in B.C., yet.”
Her long-term goal and next phase for the project is to try to find a chemical that’s just as good for use in fire retardant, without being a hazard to the environment. That will be the next phase of the project, she explained.
Another big winner was Kail Keys, 15, of Mount Sentinel Secondary School in Nelson, who has been working on a way to process used motor oil to create new products using microwave energy. The idea came to him from his family’s history as mechanics and knowing literal millions of gallons are wasted when it could be processed and turned into many useful products.
Since the 1990s, microwave pyrolysis – heating organic materials like petroleum to decompose in the absence of oxygen – has been looked at to recycle plastic.
“This method usually takes plastic, burns it and turns it into natural gas,” he said, “I wanted to take it a step back and heat oil to essentially make it boil. Once it’s boiled, physical contaminants are left behind and what you have left is liquid gold.”
His project looked at the composition of motor oil, how it degrades and how oxidation works, as well as the additive package that goes into oils and how antioxidants work. He also analyzed how microwaves work and interact with molecules in oil. He found that in theory if a polar catalyst is added to the oil, it can be distilled to use microwave energy.
These are standard microwaves from a typical household microwave oven, he added.
Knowing his concept works, Keys said his next step is to try to build a full-scale oven using this method. Right now he’s hindered by the high risk of combustion if there’s oxygen in the system, so he will have to build this apparatus in an oxygen-free environment, such as a vacuum, or replace the oxygen with an inert gas. Water is another hazard, as it can trigger combustion. The other hindrance is extraction as motor oil is made up of several hydrocarbons of varying weights and boiling points. They will fracture during boiling, so getting them to condense back to a single fluid will also be a challenge.
Once those challenges are overcome, he said the possibilities of application are vast.
“I hope to have some answers and come back next year to show them off,” he said. “This is a legacy project, I started this last year and made it to the nationals. That focused on extraction, now this is my theory of purifying it. There are so many applications for petroleum and this gives us a new method to expand on them.”
A full list of winners will come at a later date.
