I'm suffering from average vernacular syndrome: April 2007

EDX 19, which stands for Engineering Design Exhibition, the 19th, is a platform where all qualified 3rd Year Studnts' Engineering Team Projects (ETPs), Final Year Stdnts' Projects (FYPs), including various inventions from UTP's lecturers, are exhibited for public. Simply said, it is an engineering design exhibition lah!

So basically there are 3 categories:

1 Final Year Projects (FYP)

2 Final Year Design Projects (FYDP)

3 Engineering Team Projects (ETP)

all of which to be won.

PRE-EDX

Me and my 5 other teamm8s, who come from various engineering programmes-Chemical, Electrical, Civil and Mechanical Engineering Programme- competed in the pre-EDX in the ETP category, and weren't looking forward to get through to the next round. Reason being, we'd failed during the demo and our protoype sucks! It was so screwed-up that one of the evaluators bluntly commented,

" You've got good idea, but you've failed it! "

..and immidiately left our group standing dumbfounded, leaving us with no chance to defend or at least justify our theory.

Surprisingly enough, 5 days later, my team was listed as one of the qualified groups for the 19th EDX...Huahua...!! We've never figured out, till today, how that was made possible.

THE DAY

Ok, so my team was miraculaously qualified for this 19th exhibition. Of course, like any other team, we'd to put in 'additional' efforts to our project so that no one can disparage our idea during the exhibition. We had to build new prototype by adding some improvement features, we carried out a demo to produce our own video simulation, and some other fixing.

Our group proposed a boom for oil spill cleanup by utilizing human hair as the main component. Ngehehe...some of you may say "Yuck..disgusting!". I know some of you would, I can tell because some of my teamm8s had the same perception towards human hair...thank God they didn't object the idea along the way completing this project....ngehehe..

What we did was actually making the hair into 4cm x 4cm packets as shown in the fig.

Know that human hair does not actually 'absorb' the oil. Instead, it 'adsorbs' the oil.

And we put a lot of these hair packets inside the boom (see figure below) that we have designed in such a way that it increases the efficiency of the adsorbency of the hair packets.

The Boom(...tgn sape la tue..kekeke!)

To increase the efficiency of the adsorbency of the hair, we figured out that by stirring, the amount of oil absorbed is increased by a margin of 50%. So, how do we incorporate the concept of stirring in our boom? We had to install a center blade inside the boom as you can see in the following figure.

View from inside the boom

The center blade provides rotations in the boom to stir the mixture of oil and sea water. The mechanism of the boom is more or less described in the following figure.

Click picture for larger view

The 2nd model ready for simulation.

And for the sake of EDX, we had to carry out some tests for our simulation video. A very simple one.....Now notice the difference of the quality of the water before and after we applied our boom.

BEFORE

AFTER A WHILE...

AFTER

Tadaaaa...! Kesan minyak degil hilang! Kekekeke!

So, we'd managed to increase the efficiency of the application of human hair in our project. Too bad, we left the EDX empty handed. We didn't win any of the award offered which are:

1 Best ETP design

2 Best FYP Design

3 Best FYDP Design
4 The most innovative award
5 Peoples' Choice Award

But overall, I believe our group did a very good job. Well done to my teamm8s.