Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello. This is my first year that I have to do a "high-level science fair project" and I'm absolutely lost. I was interested in either water purification or cleaning up oil spills. I did some background research, but I'm afraid that just water purification with alternate methods wouldn't be considered advanced enough, and I'm totally lost on how to do anything with oil spills because I'm not sure of how to model one. I have been thinking on how to do this for the past month, and now the procedure and materials list is due on Thurday, and I'm completely lost. I also kind of have this idea about an invention that I have been thinking about, but I'm not sure if I want to post it here. If anyone could help, that would be great. Thanks a bunch!

Hi,

I would not give up on alternative waste water treatment technology as a potential topic. There is a very urgent need to find low cost highly efficient methods of treating sewage & waste water to turn it into safe potable drinking water. The whole US southwest must find a solution to this soon or our population will run out of water to live. This is a terribly urgent problem with really high bad implications for all of us if it is not solved. Can you help? If you can the problem is not too simple for a science fair project. I suspect the solution lies with using clever biological processes, though the California Bay area is looking into a pilot plant using reverse osmosis. One key is to try to find a way to use treatment process to generate enough energy to operate the treatment plant, and to not consume additional chemical supplies in treating the water (you want to decrease, definitely not increase, the salinity (dissolved salts) in the water coming out of the treatment.) Some people have dreamed about using microbial fuel cells for this process, see Professor Bruce Logan, Pennsylvania State University:

http://www.engr.psu.edu/ce/enve/logan/b ... e_cell.htm

Notice this 2004 Paul Busch award notice (down the page - also notice WERF and the Paul L Busch award on this site):
http://www.werf.org/AM/Template.cfm?Sec ... g_Research

Others have looked into using marshes:

http://www.appropedia.org/Arcata_Marsh_overview

http://info.ngwa.org/gwol/pdf/762900712.PDF

http://ddr.nal.usda.gov/bitstream/10113 ... 094790.pdf

http://assets.panda.org/downloads/water_project.pdf


Another idea would be to use algae to extract the organic compounds in the wastewater to use as food, maybe to make synthetic oil(another hot topic):

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewab ... ign=110410

I hope this generates some useful ideas for you. This is a terribly critical research area that urgently needs attention from some bright minds. I encourage you to be one of them!

Best regards,

Barrett L. Tomlinson

Thanks a bunch!