A Westlock whiz-kid is off to nationals after his big win at the Edmonton Regional Science Fair.
Kyle Schole was one of eight grand-prize winners at the Edmonton Regional Science Fair held this weekend at Edmonton's Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) campus. He will now represent the region at the national science fair this May in Peterborough, Ont.
Schole, a Grade 11 student at Westlock's Richard F. Staples Secondary School, worked seven months in a hospital lab to discover a strain of bacteria that can turn tires into electricity.
This will be his fourth time at nationals, Schole said, but he's pumped all the same. "Knowing that I'll be spending a week with seven of Edmonton's brightest kids is an incredible feeling for sure."
Small kids, big ideas
About 210 students from Edmonton and the surrounding counties took part in the fair, said Terry Bayrock, member at large for the Edmonton Regional Science Fair Council.
These events are meant to promote curiosity and help kids meet their fellow scientists. "I was a geek before it was fashionable," he said, recalling his first science fair, "and here's all these other kids that are just like you." Past fairs have seen spectacular, often patentable inventions such as bulletproof armour and cancer-spotting biomarkers.
Kendall Leighton of St. Albert took second in her class for showing how to turn grass into gasoline. "A real current issue is rising gas prices," she said, so the search is on for alternative fuels.
The Sir George Simpson student mashed 150 grams of grass together with tinder polypore and fairy ring mushrooms — two common fungi. The fungi, in combination with yeast, converted the grass into alcohol, which she then used in a model plane engine.
This is fuel anyone can make in their backyard, Leighton said, and it helps conserve fossil fuels. She hoped to scale up the project next year to fuel a car engine.
Tire power
Schole said he got the idea for his project when he drove by the Champagne Edition Inc. tire processing plant.
Tire recyclers use a lot of power to shred tires for use in other products, Schole said, but those products are in low demand, which leaves piles of tires sitting on the ground leaching toxins into the environment. Knowing that bacteria could break down plastics, he wanted to see if they could also eat tires.
With the plant's co-operation, he took soil samples from the site and isolated three strands of bacteria. He placed tire chunks in vials of the bacteria in solution and found that two of the strands devoured 34 per cent of the rubber in three weeks.
Not only does this get rid of the tire, Schole said, it also frees the toxins in it for later treatment. "That's a huge step forward from having it in the tire just sitting there."
Schole then had another brainwave — why not use the bacteria to make power? He built a microbial fuel cell using some pipe, two bottles, duct tape and a proton exchange membrane from the University of Queensland.
Like people, he explained, the bacteria make more energy than they need when they eat and can act as a battery under the right conditions. The bacteria generated about half a volt of electricity while eating the rubber, he found. "The best-ever microbial fuel cell has only generated two volts," he said, so these are promising results.
This project shows how you can safely and economically get rid of tires using bacteria, Schole said. "We're using an incredible amount of electricity to process [tires]," he said. "If we can make electricity from them as we process them, that's awesome."
Full contest results are available at www.ersf.ca.
