Developing and Assessing Fucose-Based Water-Soluble Bioplastics

Overview

Since their invention decades ago, single-use plastics have shaped the way people live. However, in recent years, light has been shed on the dangers they pose to marine ecosystems due to released toxins. Despite the environmental hazards surrounding single-use plastic waste, there is little research regarding the development of water-soluble bioplastics from renewable sources to mitigate these effects. The purpose of this study was to develop water-soluble bioplastics from algae and other natural materials. This work expands upon previous methods of developing bioplastics, but the composition of the polymer itself is novel. It was hypothesized there would be a difference in the dissolution and pH alteration of the fucose-based products in comparison to previously developed PVA-based plastics. Four trials were performed, each with varying amounts of fucose by mass. Additionally, these trials were directly compared to previously studied polyvinyl alcohol-based plastics with different compositions of PVA by mass. Each product was tested in both freshwater and 3.5% saline media; pH level was recorded after each 24-hour interval. I found that the 90% fucose-based plastic dissolved the most with 63.24% dissolution; this was less than the 72.55% of the 90% PVA plastic’s dissolved mass. Chi-Square tests comparing the fucose and PVA plastics, showed no significant difference in the dissolutions. The PVA plastics did not significantly alter their freshwater environments’ while the fucose-based plastics significantly altered pH after both 24 and 48 hours of testing, as supported by Pvalues of 0.0002 and 0.001, respectively. NORTH CAROLINA Assessing the Efficiency of Copper Thermoelectric Generators Compared to the Industry Standard of Ceramic Matthew Ayala Northside High School, Jacksonville, NC With global calls to better conserve energy, current computer systems have been a large adversary to the effort. Computer systems, however, have a centralized heat source that can be converted to energy through Thermoelectric Generators, also called TEGs. TEGs have been relatively unused due to their low efficiency levels, at about only 5-8% of heat to energy. This has also led to TEGs being unresearched despite their potential. Even with low efficiency, TEGs have several advantages to implementation such as easy installment, little maintenance due to no moving parts, and their ability to create energy with just the temperature input. Thermoelectric generators are currently only widely used in extreme conditions such as on military and aerospace equipment, where the significant temperature difference needed to generate useful energy is present. Our study aimed to reduce the extreme conditions required to make TEGs beneficial by determining the most efficient TEG type between the two most commonly manufactured, the industry standard of ceramic and copper, and allow their implementation on a larger scale. We tested the different TEG’s voltage outputs at certain temperatures which were pegged to the average CPU temperature at differing usage levels of personal and industrial computer systems. We found that ceramic TEGs would be more effective for personal devices due to higher voltages at lower temperatures compared to copper. However, ceramic hit a threshold and became less efficient at around 100°Cwhereas copper TEGs continued to increase voltage levels past 100°C, making it viable for industrial use.

Competition history

• JSHS 2022 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

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