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  • 2 years ago
A science fair at the Lakshmi Girls Hindu College finds that the country's watercourses are polluted with microplastics, caused by industrial waste. A group of three students may have also found a solution for the problem.
Transcript
00:00 Tech Talk is brought to you by Flu, inspired by your harshest critics.
00:04 You rediscover flu at discoverflu.co.
00:08 It's science fair time at the Lakshmi Girls Hindu College.
00:16 Though not a day for teaching, students came out in their numbers
00:20 to witness the future of energy, wind powered homes, bamboo homes,
00:25 hydroelectricity, a tumbling composter and even items made from recycled plastic.
00:31 Feeling 40, but it keeps getting cold.
00:34 Why not grab yourself an insulator?
00:37 Ever feel like you can't get the grip of something?
00:49 Well, this bunch designed a mechanical hand.
00:53 It uses the physical and mechanical forces of push and pull.
00:58 And it is inspired by the human hand and how it works.
01:04 So the green string is used to represent the tendons in our hands
01:08 that help us to move our muscles.
01:12 Chandra Balrop, head of the science department, says this fair
01:16 has existed for over a decade.
01:18 This whole concept of having the science fair fits in our school development
01:22 plan. The idea is to give the children an opportunity to engage
01:28 in a practical way with the science so that, you know, there's a
01:33 it bridges the gap between what they learn in theory with real world application.
01:38 Applications like this water powered hydroponic system designed by Chelsea,
01:44 Jaya and Sandhya.
01:46 We have a hydroelectric turbine that spins, right?
01:48 We have water pushed from a pump.
01:51 And it'll have pressure water pushing this right as it turns.
01:53 You're going to create energy here.
01:56 And it's going to power this motor.
01:57 It's a copper motor.
01:58 We could also substitute it by putting copper wires wrapped around a CD.
02:01 So this pushes this turns and it causes this to gain energy.
02:06 And when the motor is connected, there are two plugs here and the both pumps
02:09 will be plugged on.
02:11 So this pump here will transport water to fall on through the turbine
02:15 and the pressure from the water will cause the turbine to spin,
02:18 generating electricity and the other pump will transport the nutrients water.
02:23 So here we have nutrients in this water.
02:25 The electricity that we generate, it would be mechanical energy creating
02:29 what converts into electrical energy, creating electricity.
02:33 Right. Then it would be able to fuel the pump and go to the sprinkler.
02:37 Ms.
02:38 Balrop explains the benefits of activities like these are multifold.
02:43 We want to increase the student interest in the field of science.
02:48 So we give them opportunities where they can think creatively out of the box
02:52 and come up with solutions and interventions for like real world problems.
02:57 For one student, Ishana would like to reduce the amount of waste
03:02 heading to landfills.
03:04 It is important because thirty two point four one percent
03:07 of materials and landfills is food waste.
03:11 A composter can reduce that amount by a lot if one person in Trinidad
03:15 and if each person in Trinidad and Tobago has a composter in their household.
03:19 You must have been feeling the heat.
03:22 Chances are Principal Sonia Mahes Pesad has been as well.
03:27 She's tracking out these students who designed a system to cool down a jacket.
03:32 We were feeling very hot and we decided to make a cool down jacket,
03:37 which does the opposite of a jacket.
03:40 Copper is a really good conductor.
03:42 And inside the copper tubing has isopropyl alcohol,
03:45 which is also a good conductor.
03:46 So when you place this over your hand, it's conductive.
03:49 It's out of your hand and travels up this tube into this pump,
03:53 which pumps it over the ice pack back over your hands,
03:56 which then cools your hand down.
03:58 The prototype is bulky, so these students are looking at tweaking it
04:02 for commercial applications.
04:04 This pump here is going to be electronic because a handheld pump,
04:07 while it's good for the demonstration, it's not fast enough
04:11 and it can't last very long.
04:14 So this will be an electronic pump.
04:16 We need to look at getting thinner and more durable copper wires,
04:19 copper tubing, I mean, to put into the fabric because we want to be very wearable.
04:23 Solar powered car, anyone?
04:26 Well, there's a prototype for that, too.
04:29 A solar powered car is just a vehicle that uses photovoltaic cells
04:34 to convert sunlight into usable energy.
04:37 The main advantages would be that it's a good source of
04:40 renewable and clean energy.
04:44 It's the most available power that we have, it's from the sun
04:46 and it's always there.
04:49 It benefits in our environment with zero emissions.
04:51 It works by converting solar energy into electrical energy.
04:57 That electrical energy goes to the electric motor
05:01 and the electric motor would spin.
05:04 And when it spins, it's connected to gears.
05:09 So the gears would spin as well.
05:11 And the gears are connected to the wheels.
05:14 So the wheels would spin and then the whole car would move.
05:17 It's now time to introduce you to the real show stopper and winner of the fair.
05:23 Three sisters investigated three water courses, the Kearney River,
05:28 the Arima River and the Valencia River for the presence of microplastics.
05:33 Microplastics can be seen by the naked eye.
05:37 We went to different water sources and we got samples
05:40 and we built a spectrometer.
05:42 So we decided to test each water sample
05:46 to find out exactly what was in it, because we wanted to know
05:49 what kind of plastics we would have found in the water.
05:51 They were able to pinpoint the types of plastics present
05:56 as the spectrometer shows how different plastics interact with light.
06:00 Polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride were found at all three rivers.
06:06 However, these types of plastics come from industrial waste.
06:10 Here is the students proposed solution to the problem.
06:13 We tested all the samples through that paper
06:15 and all the plastics remained in the paper as residue.
06:18 So it goes to show that these industrial, because we found polystyrene,
06:22 PVC and polyethylene mainly, it shows that this is industrial waste
06:27 because nobody is going to come with PVC and just put it in a river
06:30 in smaller mountains like that.
06:31 So it shows that it's industrial waste.
06:33 So it means that these industrial factories,
06:36 they just need to look at their filter system.
06:39 The Karani River was found to be the least polluted with microplastics.
06:43 Orvisita Wari, Rupnirain, TV6 News.
06:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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