A Canadian student won the world's biggest high school science competition on May 15, Friday. He earned the top prize of $75,000 for inventing a new germ control device for airplane cabins.
Raymond Wang, 17, won first prize for his engineering invention, according to Science Recorder. He said that he had had no expectations to win the competition. The contest was the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Finals of the high school science contest were held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
After seeing news reports about West Africa's Ebola outbreak, Wang started thinking about the problem. He learned that unlike Ebola, diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the "swine flu" spread through air particles.
In packed airplane cabins, passengers are breathing the same air contaminants. Wang explained that there are two "turbulent swirls" occurring. Diseases are spreading across the aircraft's rows, and along the length of the airplane cabin.
Wang decided to tackle the problem when he saw the need for it to be addressed as the airline industry was doing little research to improve the air quality in airplanes.
The Canadian high school student made high-resolution simulations of airflow inside a commercial airplane cabin. He then designed fin-shaped objects to be fitted into the aircraft's air inlets. This created a "ventilation zone" around each passenger. So germs were removed from the cabin before they contacted all the passengers.
Wang said that his invention would make fresh air in the cabin 90 percent more available, according to The Washington Post. It would make airborne bacteria 55 times less concentrated.
The cost for Wang's invention would be $1,000 per airplane, and the installation could be done overnight. This would make the new technology practical and affordable for the airline industry.
To create his airplane device, Wang learned "computational fluid dynamics" on his own. He has already filed a patent application for the invention.
However, this was not Wang's first invention. He has already invented a self-cleaning garbage can, and an electricity-generating device that creates power from rain hitting roofs.