Have you ever wondered about the knocking or clunking in your pipes when you turn off a tap?
École Alpha Secondary Grade 11 student Danté Wong wondered about it too and turned that curiosity into a medal-winning project at the Youth Sciences Canada national science fair in Montreal last month.
Wong discovered the knocking is caused by a pressure surge called a water hammer, and his project – which won a bronze medal in the senior category of the energy challenge – explores whether that power could be put to use.
“I wondered if there was enough energy in this pressure spike to try to harvest it,” Wong states in an online description of his project. “After some experiments, the answer turned out to be yes.
Energy harvested from a domestic plumbing system would be small, he said, but from larger systems it could be both significant and environmentally friendly.
“Adding an energy storage device to this system will allow that energy to be captured for later use,” Wong said.
The Alpha grad was the only Burnaby student chosen from the Greater Vancouver region to compete at the fair, which included excursions in Montreal and a keynote address by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.
About 500,000 students launch a science fair project at their schools each year, according to Youth Science Canada. About 25,000 students compete in one of 104 regional fairs, and the top 485 competed at the national event this year.
“So, you’re looking at sort of the top one per cent of the top one per cent of students in sciences fairs,” said Youth Science Canada executive director Brad McCabe of Wong’s bronze-medal performance.
