Our Project
For our project, my teammates and I were to think of a world problem and solve it using Bio tech. My teammates and I thought of many problems that we could solve but we decided to try and solve oil spills.
For our solution, we found a microbe, Alcanivorax Borkumensis, that can eat oil and is already naturally found in polluted waters. We designed a machine that would suck in the oily water and clean it using these microbes. We named this machine GOSCA which stands for Global Oil Spill Cleanup Apparatus. It would be GPS and radio controlled, powered by solar panels, and it would move using a motor. The turbine inside would churn the water into smaller droplets that would allow the microbes to eat it faster, while the nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizer would allow the bacteria to thrive. The filter inside should keep the bacteria and fertilizer out of the cleaned water that would be released back into the water.
For our solution, we found a microbe, Alcanivorax Borkumensis, that can eat oil and is already naturally found in polluted waters. We designed a machine that would suck in the oily water and clean it using these microbes. We named this machine GOSCA which stands for Global Oil Spill Cleanup Apparatus. It would be GPS and radio controlled, powered by solar panels, and it would move using a motor. The turbine inside would churn the water into smaller droplets that would allow the microbes to eat it faster, while the nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizer would allow the bacteria to thrive. The filter inside should keep the bacteria and fertilizer out of the cleaned water that would be released back into the water.
Content
Biotechnology: using biology and industrial products to benifit a problem
Alcanivorax Borkumensis: a microbe that can eat oil which we use in our solution to oil spills.
Alcanivorax Borkumensis: a microbe that can eat oil which we use in our solution to oil spills.
Reflection
This project was one of my favorites because we had the freedom to choose what we wanted to do. I learned a lot from this project. One of those things was about myself. I learned that it is harder to push myself than when someone else pushes you and that just because someone else isn't pushing you as hard as they usually do, it doesn't mean you shouldn't work your hardest. One pit that my team had was that we totally forgot to add how our machine would move. We had everything on our schematics from how to keep the bacteria in the machine to how the machine wouldn't be lost, except how it would move. We had to quickly think about how it would move a couple days before we presented our ideas to the panel of judges. Another pit was that we couldn't find a cost tha our machine would cost. We spent a lot of time trying to research the materials that we could have use and the cost, but it all boiled down to the testing of the materials and parts. Due to the amount of testing that we couldn't do during school, we could not find the approximate cost of the machine. Although there were some pits, were were many peeks. One of those peeks was that we were able to go into great depth of how our expiements would be tested and how much testing we needed before and after the GOSCA would be built. Another peek we had was that our team worked very well together. When we were off task we would all say to each other that we needed to get back to work so we could finish our project and perfect it.