CAN YOU turn breakable spoons into hard floor? Can you track bacteria in minutes? Can you tell a plant just from its scent? Sure you can, especially with some of this year’s best scientific theses that signed the technological gadgets and health gizmos of tomorrow. Here’s a Varsitarian rundown.
Faculty of Engineering: Tiles from spoons and forks
Plastic forks and spoons alone make up at least 30 per cent of waste products in Metro Manila’s dumpsites. This prompted Chemical Engineering students McRobart Steeler dela Peña, Niña Diana Alonzo, and Arianne Badanna to recycle plastic utensils into floor and wall tiles.
Their thesis, “Utilization of Waste Polystyrene and Spent Palm Oil in the Manufacture of Floor and Wall Tiles,” introduces a way of recycling polystyrene spoons and forks normally found in fast food chains. Polystyrene is a chemical produced from petroleum.
In their experiment, plastic spoons and forks are mixed with palm oil to increase corrosion resistance, weatherability, and hardness. The mixture is then heated at a pre-determined optimum temperature and introduced to a mold of tiles where the temperature is lowered to allow hardening.
According to Dela Peña, their thesis can help reduce waste in the country. “Our research provides an alternative for food industries to recycle their wastes, generating income while helping in our country’s problem on solid waste management. It adheres to the principle of sustainable development,” he said.
The group also designed a device that can trap fatal styrene vapor, a substance released from heating polystyrene. The study topped the ENGvention 2K7, a competition held last February 12 showcasing different theses in the Faculty of Engineering.
The thesis also became a finalist in the National Chemical Engineering Undergraduate Research Congress last February at De La Salle University. Dela Peña, meanwhile, was one of the three recipients of the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) Science BPI-DOST awards for research from UST.
Medical Technology: Stripping bacteria
It normally takes a day before fatal intestinal infections like meningitis, typhoid fever, and food poisoning can be known, but Medical Technology seniors Marie Abigail Chan, Mariel Diane Franciso, Prima Bianca Gaffud, Engelbert Simon Perillo, Erika Marie Rangel, and Thonnie Rose See offer a life-saving device via a faster diagnosis of these diseases.
“Reagent Strips: A Modification of IMViC Tests” provides an alternative to the IMViC Tests, currently being used in hospitals. It suggests the use of reagent strips that are infused with reagents from the original indole, methyl red, vogues-proskauer, and citric utilization tests (IMViC).
The IMViC test identifies enterics that are bacteria associated with meningitis, typhoid fever, and food poisoning. The tests are done by introducing the reagents to the sample of the suspected enteric in the test tubes. The enteric would then react to the reagent in a way that would distinguish it from other enterics. The enterics used in the study, because of their well-known IMViC reactions, were Escherichia coli or Enterobacter aerogenes.
According to Chan, their thesis is intended for school use to make diagnosing intestinal infections faster and easier.
“The original IMViC tests have a longer incubation period, which means it would normally take 24 hours. But our modified IMViC tests are faster and cheaper than the machines currently used in hospitals, with the results appearing only after five minutes,” Chan said.
The group, however, addressed several problems with the reagent strips. One of the modified IMViC tests, the vogues-proskauer test, failed to yield similar results like that of the original test. Problems on preservation of the strips for longer shelf life were also brought up.
The group was chosen to represent the department in the 2007 Science and Technology Undergraduate Research Symposium last February 20 at the Thomas Aquinas Research Center, where Chan was hailed second best speaker.
Applied Physics: Have a nose round
With the growing medicinal plant market comes the necessity for quality control procedures. This was the problem addressed by Applied Physics graduate and Varsitarian managing editor Jefferson Evalarosa in his thesis, “An Electronic Nose Based On Piezoelectric Quartz Crystal Sensors For The Discrimination of Three Philippine Medicinal Plants.”
“The herbal medicine industry generated 60 billion dollars in global sales in 2002 but the existing quality control methods are either expensive or time-consuming,” Evalarosa said.
An electronic nose, or “e-nose” is an instrument capable of recognizing simple or complex odors of certain plants. For his thesis, Evalarosa used polymer-coated piezoelectric quartz crystal sensors, in order to distinguish the medicinal plants lagundi, sambong, and herba buena from each other.
By exposing the vapor of the plants to the piezoelectric quartz crystal, an increase in the crystal’s mass and a decrease in the frequency of vibration are achieved. The frequency change responses of the test plants are recorded and subjected to Principal Component Analysis (PCA), a powerful statistical technique for reducing the amount of data when there is a correlation present.
In the study, PCA yielded three distinct clusters that differentiate the three plants from each other. Thus, if an unknown plant is subjected to the e-nose, its identity would be determined through its proximation to one of the three clusters.
Evalarosa’s study emerged the best among 12 theses presented in his degree program. His thesis was also presented in the Undergraduate Research Symposium sponsored by the UST-Research Center for the Natural Sciences last February 20. Alena Pias B. Bantolo
