Via The Globe and Mail, a report by Mark Hume: High-flying invention marks B.C. student as top science mind of his age. Excerpt:
Grade 12 is always a busy, exciting time for students but Raymond Wang has had a little more on his schedule than most.
In addition to preparing for final exams, the St. George’s School student in Vancouver has been doing public speaking engagements, including giving a TED talk and making a presentation at the Society of Experimental Test Pilots annual symposium in the United States.
In addition, he’s been talking with Boeing Co. and Airbus SAS about how to get aviation regulatory approval for a device he developed for a high school science fair.
Last spring, the 17-year-old vaulted into the headlines when he won $75,000 (U.S.) and first prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, which is like the Olympics for young science students. It is the world’s largest high school science fair, and to get top prize all Mr. Wang had to do was beat out 1,700 brilliant students who had been selected from 422 science fairs in more than 75 countries.
His idea was to make aircraft cabins healthier by improving air quality.
“Essentially, after doing various computational and visual simulations, I designed a patent-pending device that, for the cost of about $1,000, reduces disease transmission in planes by about 55 times,” Mr. Wang said.
He didn’t just come up with a smart idea, but he went into a lab and proved it would work.
“I generated the industry’s first high-fidelity simulations for aircraft cabin air flow,” Mr. Wang said. “A lot of people have studied the outside of airplanes extensively, and understandably so, because the airplane has to fly. But what I’ve been able to do … after 32 different simulations, is come up with a solution [to improve air quality], economically without the need to take the whole cabin apart or spend tens of thousands of man-hours or millions of dollars.”
Simply put, what Mr. Wang has done is figure out how, by modifying the air-circulation pattern, to isolate passengers in their own cushions of air, isolating them from the germs coughed and sneezed by fellow travellers.
Now all he has to do, between studying for exams and finding time to hang out with friends, is get regulatory approval for the device.
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