Good for You!

Emma Brown:

Canadian student Raymond Wang, 17, won the world’s largest high school science competition on Friday, taking home the top prize of $75,000 for inventing a new way to keep germs from spreading in airplane cabins.

“It’s very exciting. I absolutely did not expect it,” Wang said by telephone from Pittsburgh, host city for the finals of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. “It’s literally the happiest day of my life.”…

Wang said he decided to tackle the problem when he discovered that few people in the airline industry were actively working on ways to improve the quality of airplane air.

He created high-resolution simulations of airflow inside the cabin of a commercial aircraft — a Boeing 737, to be specific. And then he used those simulations to design fin-shaped devices that fit into the airplane’s existing air inlets.

The fins redirect the airflow, creating virtual walls of air around each passenger. Each person gets what Wang calls a “personalized ventilation zone” where sneezes are vanquished, pushed out of the cabin before they can spread in a turbulent burst.

His invention would improve the availability of fresh air in the cabin by 190 percent, he said, and would reduce the concentration of airborne germs by 55 times. Wang estimates that it would cost $1,000 per airplane and could be installed overnight, making it easy and economical for airlines.