BT YOUNG SCIENTIST AND TECHNOLOGY EXHIBITION
Gas for the lab
If anyone wants to set up a lab, but has no gas supply Sinead Clarke, transition year student at St Mary’ s in Ballina, County Mayo has a solution. Running a modest 13 volts through water with a dash of calcium hydroxide to help
Wood pellets
Simple device boost performance
Shauna Dixon, secondary school student at Mount St Michael in Claremorris, discovered a simple way to boost the performance of wood-pellet boilers. Shauna was one of the winners at this year’ s BT young Scientist and Technology exhibition for her project showing how filtering out the dust can bring efficiency up by over 15 per cent. Shauna said that wood pellet boilers have become very popular, but dust from the fuel is creating serious problems. Surprisingly, it is not the dust from combustion that’ s the problem. The dust, she explained, comes with delivery, and she first became interested in this because the boiler that has been heating her home for the past six years needed extra maintenance.“ We had to keep servicing it,” she said. Deciding to investigate, Shauna found that the auger, a screw-like device, that feeds pellets down into the boiler, was becoming clogged with dust.
It struck her that removing that buildup of dust would solve a lot of problems, and it also occurred to her that the the current flow, can produce enough gas to keep a Bunsen burner in action. a conversation about injecting hydrogen into car engines first got Sinead interested in the idea that useful fuel could be generated from water, so she began to investigate the possibilities. It struck her that gas can be a problem for labs. There is a certain amount of risk
solution was simple. as she explained, Shauna went off to the supermarket and got an ordinary bin. Turning the bin on its side below the hopper, she stuck a shoe box inside to act as a dust collector. as she remarked, there was nothing complicated involved, and anybody with a wood-pellet boiler could rig up a similar home-made filter.
Shauna has a strong practical streak, but she was also very keen to find out a lot more on how and why dust is attached to having gas on tap, and of course for some labs there might be no supply at all.
So, with the help of her technicallyminded dad, Sinead built a gas generating unit. In this a direct current is fed into stainless steel plates immersed in water within a closed system. The well-made and very professional looking unit, said Sinead,“ took forever to make,” and with a 13 volt supply it can generate an impressive half a litre of hydrogen a minute.
The gas, a mix of hydrogen and oxygen, bubbles out through a water filled chamber, and as Sinead explained, this is an essential safety feature because it stops flash-back from ignited gas if the pressure drops. The gas can be used in a modified Bunsen burner and as Sinead explained, the unit is safe to use, and probably safer than a conventional system.
“ as far as I know,” she said,“ there is nothing like it on the market.”
Sinead, who did the project at home, helped by her dad, said she likes science, but tackling a project like this really gets her fired up.“ I would really like to do more on this project.”( TK)
such a problem. Wood Pellet boilers have become quite common around Claremorris, and as she discovered, most of her neighbours also had similar problems with dust.
The problem, she found, begins with delivery. Pellets, which come from a supplier in northern Ireland, are fed into the hopper at high pressure, and naturally with all the vibration and mixing involved, a considerable amount of dust is generated.( TK)