School Project: Afsha's Working Model could Save Marine Life

Topperlearning.com features projects designed by students across the length and breadth of India. A Class IX student from Lucknow tells us all about her disaster management project, designed for the Jawaharlal Nehru National Science Exhibition contest conducted by NCERT.

Name: Afsha N Khan
Class: IX
School: Kendriya Vidyalaya, Gomti Nagar, Lucknow

Afsha's Inspiration: Sympathy for the cruel deaths of marine life due to oil spills by ships, inspired her to design a working model, to help ships re-collect the oil, and thus, save marine life! "The chemical pollutants (fuel) cause gastric ulcers and high rate of parasitic infection to marine life.  This project is effort to save marine life," she adds.
 
Theme and Concept: Every ship needs additional machinery to re-collect the oil from the sea surface, in case of an oil spill.

Afsha, being an environment-conscious girl, created a model to demonstrate how this machinery works. She calls it Pollution Controller and Fuel Collector.
 
In The Picture: IXTOC I exploratory well blow-out on June 3,1997 in the Bay of Campeche of Cuidad del Carmen, Mexico. The accident resulted in an oil spillage of 140 million gallons! (Image sourced from Temple.edu)

The Principle: The adhesive property of aluminum attracts the oil components from the surface of water.

How it works: Aluminum foil covered discs are partially dipped in water (sea surface), then, made to rotate using the rotary pump. Due to the adhesive property of aluminum, they attract the oil components. The electric pipes attached to the discs, then, direct the oil into an empty container.