Lori Glenn
March 26, 2007 11:41 pm
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MOULTRIE — This week, six Colquitt County High School (CCHS) students will represent the region at the state science fair in Athens.
Laura Robinson, 15, sophomore, won first place in her division recently at Darton Regional Science Fair and was distinguished with awards from the Thronateeska Heritage Foundation, an Earth and Space Science Award and a U.S. Army Award for Outstanding Project.
Robinson, a diver since the age of 12, compared a diver’s consumption of air in salt and fresh spring waters. She conducted dives at 33 and 66 feet and timed how long it took for her and her father to use a certain amount of air in their tanks. Her calculations determined that more air is consumed diving in salt water.
Andrew Clark, 16, sophomore, took first place in his division with a motor oil volatility comparison. Clark heated five brands of synthetic oil, racing oil Amsoil, racing oil Redline, Mobil 1, Pennzoil Platinum and Wal-Mart brand SuperTech, in a deep fryer. He found that Amsoil was the least volatile, followed by Redline, Pennzoil, Mobil 1 and lastly SuperTech.
Clark, who has an interest in racing, won first place in seventh grade in state competition with a similar project comparing synthetic, synthetic blend and petroleum oils.
“Synthetics pretty much cleaned house, so I went back and picked all synthetics,” he said, adding even the synthetic SuperTech was less volatile than more expensive petroleum and blend products.
Erik Rentz, 16, sophomore, won first place in his division with a comparison of the effectiveness of three brands of detergents in powder and liquid forms. He was awarded a $300 savings bond for Best Overall Project from SASCO Chemical Group, Inc.
For his project, Rentz stained lengths of cloth with ketchup, mustard, chocolate and ink and then ran three samples of cloth for each detergent to see which lifted stains best.
“My final results were that Tide powder lifted stains the best with Tide liquid coming in second. So, Tide’s a pretty good detergent,” he said.
Rentz said he has his sights set on a pharmaceutical career.
Also advancing to state are second place winners Luke White and Ashley Jimenez.
White, 17, senior, was distinguished with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Special Award for his method of cleaning up oil spills. Using it as a source of carbon dioxide, he added Alka-Seltzer to a magnetorheological fluid, an iron and oil mixture that solidifies near a magnet.
“It pushed the oil to the outside,” he said, allowing him to then use a magnet to pick up the oily substance.
Hall said he believes that White’s is the first science fair project using CO2 as a cleaning agent for oil.
• Ashley Jimenez, 17, senior, was honored with the SASCO Chemical Group, Inc. Industrial Chemistry Award and The Darsey Family Foundation Excellence in Environmental Science Award.
Jimenez purified water with prickly pear cactus. She chose prickly pear, she said, because it’s most common. She was able to successfully remove heavy metals from 1,000 milliliter water samples tainted with mercury, lead nitrate and silver nitrate with two pods of cactus.
The result: Purified water separated from the contaminants, which deposited to the bottom of the sample. Through more experiments, Jimenez determined that the more cactus used, the more effective the purification.
“In Mexico, they would dump their cactus water into drinking water,” she said. “It helps filter out sediments as well.”
Jimenez, who’s also gifted in art and photography, plans to attend Flagler University in St. Augustine, Fla.
Other CCHS students, although not advancing to state, came home with honors from the regional competition.
• Alan Parten, 17, senior, was distinguished with a U.S. Army Award for Outstanding Project and the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Award for his fluidized bed furnace, a disposal method for organic matter including plastics. Air is blown through the furnace past limerocks an inch in diameter that move around like a fluid, Parten said.
After material and accelerant is ignited, air flow makes all of the material oxidize and burn completely.
“Once the rocks get hot, you don’t have to add any more fire, you don’t have to add any more accelerant, you just keep the rocks hot and keep air blowing over them and as long as you’re adding in trash it will keep burning. All you have to do is keep an air supply to it,” he said. “...I thought it would be once of those projects that kind of flopped, but it actually worked out.”
Smoke dissipates as heat increases, and there’s no carbon dioxide release, he said. Half the heat goes to reheating the rocks, and the rest is dispersed into air, he said, so the furnace can be handled during incineration.
Parten, who likes to talk, said he’s thinking about earning a college degree in business with the aim of becoming an entrepreneur.
• Arturo Arenas, 17, junior was distinguished with a U.S. Army Awards for Outstanding Project and U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Award for his gyroscopic-steered hover craft.
Typically, hover crafts are steered by a rudder system and a fan, but a rudder system depends too much on air flow, he said. If there’s no air, steering suffers, he said.
“With a gyroscope system, you don’t really need any air to steer it, so it’s much better with a gyroscope, and it’s much quicker turning with a gyroscope,” he said.
Arenas said he plans to add a propulsion system to his gyroscope system to better control steering.
• Jason Oxley, 18, senior, was distinguished with a U.S. Air Force Award for his experiments with air hockey air foil in relation to airplane wings. Oxley compared the lift and drag of foil punctured with micro blowing holes to a regular wing that blows out compressed air.
“The idea was to get the air that goes over the surface of the wing to travel faster and cause less drag over the top surface and make a more efficient foil. It was supposed to create more lift too, because I figured if the air is flowing faster over the top, which that’s how lift works — air over the top of the wing flows faster than the air under it. If it moves faster over the top, it would create more lift, but it didn’t work that way,” he said. “Actually it did reduce the drag a lot, but it did not increase the lift.”
Instead of airplanes, Oxley’s idea could work better for cars, he said. But he has other ideas to further his experiments for flight technology.
And he might get the chance in college. He plans to go for a university degree in engineering beginning at Valdosta State University.
• Zack Felts, 17, junior, won the Pellicano Co., Inc. Engineering Award for his development of an alternative building material.Using his interest in engineering and work experience in construction, Felts dissolved Styrofoam in acetone to make a pliable putty. He combined the putty with sifted concrete dust and sawdust to make a dough-like substance which could be molded into shapes. The result after hardening was a composite that was of comparable weight of wood and can receive stain well.
One drawback is the impractical cost of acetone used in this method, but Felts thinks he can devise a tent of sorts to trap acetone as it evaporates during the hardening process.
“If we can come up with that, it would hardly cost anything to make,” he said.
• In a separate recent competition at the Junior State Science and Humanities Symposium at the University of Georgia, four CCHS were selected to present their research papers: Parten, White, Cassianna Pace, who made paper from recycled newspaper and various fruit peels, and Magen Key.
Key, 17, senior, used waste heat from an exhaust pipe to trigger spontaneous combustion in used vegetable oil for a diesel engine. Basically, she wrapped wire around an exhaust pipe to run heat to the fuel tank. Prior to use, she filtered used vegetable oil using a filter she devised out of toilet tissue and then mixed the oil with IsoHeet to increase the flashpoint.
Although Key excells in engineering, she plans to pursue a career in medicine, she said.
Longtime Science Fair class teacher Tommy Hall, who has been teaching the class for 36 years and routinely produces winners, was selected as most outstanding teacher. CCHS, he noted, is only one of two school systems in the state to offer a science fair class.
Hall will advance to the national symposium in Huntsville, Ala., in May.
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