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Teen invents a system to keep germs from spreading on airplanes
- CountHackulus 11y agoUsing existing air systems for these seems like a nice hack. It's something that's easily implemented, though I fail to see airlines implement it any time soon. There's no financial benefit to them for this. Someone having a cold will hardly stop them from buying a plane ticket.
- dangerlibrary 11y agoKeeping staff healthy would reduce the number of sick employees at any given time. There is no way this will actually be as cheap as $1k per plane, but almost any smallish one time cost will eventually pay for itself if you can meaningfully improve worker health.
- outworlder 11y agoIf it is a cold. Just wait for the next pandemic scare.
- kaolinite 11y agoThere might be. I bet flight attendants take more sick days than most workers do and there are very real financial implications of a flight being delayed due to lack of staff.
- fluxquanta 11y ago>I bet flight attendants take more sick days than most workers do I'll take your hypothetical bet with my own speculation to the contrary: I imagine most flight attendants are in better physical shape than, say, your typical office worker due to the nature of their job, as well as being more on top of preventative health measures (vaccines and such) precisely because they know they're at higher risk due to the number of people they're exposed to.
- kaolinite 11y agoVery good point. Hard to know who is right without data, which I can't imagine we'll find. I know for a fact that if I were a flight attendant, I'd certainly make sure I had the latest flu vaccine, etc.
- geoelectric 11y agoI suspect it also works like it does with primary school teachers. They have immune systems made of iron, in part because of selection but also because they're exposed to so much every day. Their significant others on the other hand, they're sick as hell all the time...
- rjsw 11y agoI avoid flying because I always end up ill afterwards. There is a cost to airlines of doing nothing.
- brandon272 11y agoI fly frequently and I always get sick, even though I'm fairly religious with hand sanitizer and what not. I'm not sure what I do wrong.
- tspiteri 11y agoMaybe it's not just because you are more exposed to germs on the plane. One possibility is that air on planes is quite dry, and you are not drinking enough, which would stress your system. Or there can be a combination of conditions that get you sick.
- brandon272 11y agoOr the airport bathrooms. Which are more often than not kind of filthy and do not have a process for washing and drying your hands w/ paper towels that is completely touch-free.
- smeyer 11y ago>do not have a process for washing and drying your hands w/ paper towels that is completely touch-free This is different from my personal experiences. In the last few years, I've dried my hands with a touch-free system in the vast majority of airport bathrooms I've used. I've found airport bathrooms to be touch-free at a much higher rate than public restrooms in general.
- azakai 11y agoAlso, the first airline to do this will get great PR, for very little cost. I know I would pick an airline that installs this.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
- minthd 11y agoMaybe there's a segment of the population which will prefer to fly in healthier planes ?
- guard-of-terra 11y agoUnless this system is perfectly tuned, it is going to strip a belt of warm air around people and they'll get cold. Even when air is warm, breeze can make you uncomfortable, and in-flight air is often cool on its own. Net result might be more people becoming sick, not fewer.
- WalterBright 11y agoBoeing has made steady improvements in passenger comfort, and that includes increasing cabin pressure and better air circulation. They've also made a lot of improvements in reducing cabin noise and vibration. Also, the ride is a lot smoother these days.
- jawns 11y agoQuote by the teen who won the competition: "Basically a lot of this work is master's or PhD-level research." I believe it! Which makes me think ... We spend a lot of time giving high-school students a general, liberal arts education, but I think there's room in secondary education, at least for highly motivated students, to drill deeply into one particular domain. You've probably seen mattmight's famous "Illustrated guide to a Ph.D.": http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ I wondering if we shouldn't do more to encourage self-driven learners to extend that tentacle out earlier than we currently do.
- carlob 11y ago> We spend a lot of time giving high-school students a general, liberal arts education, but I think there's room in secondary education, at least for highly motivated students, to drill deeply into one particular domain. I don't know if I agree, I think it's very important to have a well rounded education by the time you come out of high school. I, for one, am very grateful to have been exposed to philosophy, literature (in more than one language), art. All stuff that I probably would not have chosen for myself. You have all of your life to specialize in a domain, what's the rush?
- kiba 11y agoWhy is it important to be well rounded?
- lotsofmangos 11y agoMakes it easier to roll.
- derekp7 11y agoIt isn't that there is intrinsic value in the various other subjects themselves, the value comes from having a shared core of knowledge / experience that can be used when interacting with others. Just two examples from recent conversations -- once I used an example that had a comparison to a canary in a coal mine. Several people in the group never heard of that phrase, so I had to explain what it meant. Another time I used the expression "Tilting at Windmills", and again that was lost on some people. So yes, it is important to be well rounded, just to have common base for general conversations.
- giarc 11y agoThe goal should be prevention instead of control. I work in infection prevention and control so can shed some light on this. The two major diseases people on planes should be worried about are measles and chickenpox. Both of which have excellent vaccines to prevent illness. TB is airborne but not highly transmissible, for example, the public health department where I live will only conduct exposure follow up for TB patients that were on a plane for longer than 7 hours, and only start with 2 rows in front, and 2 rows behind. Only if those passengers seroconvert for TB will they test the rest of the plane. Things like SARS/MERS-CoV are also a concern, but the control should be to prevent these people from getting on the plane in the first place (temperature monitoring). Influenza and other respiratory viruses are a concern, but these are spread through larger droplets and therefore only really concern those directly next to you (likely family members) and you are just as likely to pick it up in the airport lounge than on the plane. Cool invention, but just a minor cog in the chain of infection.
- jedberg 11y ago> The two major diseases people on planes should be worried about are measles and chickenpox. Both of which have excellent vaccines to prevent illness. Unless you're too young or sick to get the vaccine, or the vaccine is ineffective. I just flew on an 11 hour flight with my 4 month old, and my biggest concern was measles since she can't be vaccinated yet.
- giarc 11y agoCorrect, but she would be protected if all the other adults were vaccinated. We did a very good job over the past 60 years of almost eradicating measles and it's only be recently that cases have appeared in groups of anti-vaxxers and spreading to those too young to get the shot.
- moron4hire 11y agoThat's unfortunately not a good assumption to make.
- gusmd 11y agoI'm have a Masters in Aeroacoustics (acoustics + fluid dynamics) and work mostly on numerical simulations, so while I can see that for someone outside the field this can look like black magic, I am certainly not impressed. I mean, what he did is he used a commercial CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software, created a model of the cabin and iterated through different air outlet geometries until he found one that improved the situation. It's a brute-force approach, which could be done even by someone without Masters/PhD level CFD knowledge (we have 1st year undergrad students working on that kind of thing in the university...). It's cool that he used that for a problem that apparently is not getting the deserved attention, and he is 17 (!) but, at least in my opinion, other inventions competing for the price look much more impacting/life-changing. For instance: > Two runners-up each received $50,000. They included Wang’s fellow Canadian, Nicole Ticea, 16, who developed an inexpensive, disposable and electricity-free HIV-testing device for use in low-income communities.
- panarky 11y agoMany innovations seem simple or obvious in hindsight. But if it solves a real problem and the engineers and Airbus and Boeing didn't think of it, then it must tell us something.
- dbbolton 11y agoWho is to say that just because it hasn't been implemented, it was never thought of?
- TheGRS 11y agoThere isn't, but the losers don't get to write the history books.
- nomel 11y agoWhen I read the title, I immediately guessed the method he used. Usually this means I can find some sort of evidence from the 1800's. I'm guessing this is standard practice in hospitals, so an old idea applied to a new container, which is the norm with ideas.
- dothething 11y agoAnyone know what his parents do?
- allworknoplay 11y agoI don't understand -- there's a huge temperature and pressure differential between recirculated air in planes and the air at 35k ft. I don't see any reconditioning or pressurizing, which of course would be crazy to do anyway. What am I missing?
- jccooper 11y agoWhile it has nothing to do with the invention in the article (which is just about restructuring cabin airflow): air in an airplane is constantly introduced from outside, pressurized taps from the compressor inside the engine(s). Pressure is maintained at a set level by a valve that controls how much air escapes the plane. Most airliners will also have a recirculation/filtering/conditioning system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_control_system_%28aircraft%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_control_system_%2... If that's what you're asking. Not entirely sure.
- hvjackson 11y agoIt's not clear to me whether this solution is stable. The air flow looks very turbulent. Maybe if the air vents are blowing at a slightly different speed or if you have a few empty seats, the dynamics change a lot and you go back to a chaotic circulation pattern. Also, most airplanes have individual vents as well that can be adjusted... how would those affect the flow?
- jedberg 11y agoSo if he really wants a useful product, he should make a small insert you can put into your air vent on the plane to at least create the "protective airflow" for yourself.
- strommen 11y agoThis invention is awesome. I can't believe all the negativity in this thread for something created by a 17-year-old. So what if the technical complexity of this project isn't the super high? It's a novel approach to a real problem, he did the research to show that in theory it can be effective, and it seems reasonable practical. Beyond serious diseases, it seems very common to get a cold/cough/flu after flying. This is just anecdotal experience, but it sure seems like 100 people sharing the same 5000 cubic feet of air for 4 hours is the perfect storm for airborne contagions. CDC, please build on Raymond's work and get it rolled into production.
- sliverstorm 11y agoSo what if the technical complexity of this project isn't the super high? I would even go the other way, the low complexity of the solution makes it all that more amazing. The kid ran his own studies and created a very simple solution that requires almost no effort to implement and yet should be hugely effective. That's the hallmark of great engineering, and what I strive for every day.
- surge 11y agoRight, also less complex solutions are often the most reliable, less points of failure or things that can go wrong.
- NicoJuicy 11y agoGood ideas dont have to be complex. What would we do without a wheel :-)
- EGreg 11y agoI am very impressed both by this invention and the young invetor - seems this is one of several by him!
- WalterBright 11y agoIt's a good idea, but hasn't been tested inside a real airplane cabin. Back in the days of smoking on airliners, I'd often direct the nozzle to blow in front of my nose. It wasn't very effective, as the nozzle was too far away. It's hard to see how adding fins would improve it.
- akhilcacharya 11y agoI always wonder how these people get research mentors. I'd love to get one, and I'm in university!
- judk 11y agoHave rich parents
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Terretta 11y agoThis clean air wall or filter bubble effect is known to frequent fliers: > "Open your air vent, and aim it so it passes just in front of your face. Filtered airplane air can help direct airborne contagions away from you." http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204058404577108420985863872 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702040584045771084...