Three women are grand award winners at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair

Three talented, hard working, and lucky students were the recipients of the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award in Atlanta on May 16th. The award includes a $50,000 college scholarship. This year’s winners are:

Efficient Hydrogen Production Using Cu-Zn-Al Catalysts Prepared by Homogeneous Precipitation Method by Yi-Han Su, 17 from Taipei Municipal First Girls’ Senior High School in Taipei.

Development of Biosensors for Detecting Hazardous Chemicals by Natalie Saranga Omattage, 17, from The Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus.

Computation of the Alexander-Conway Polynomial on the Chord Diagrams of Singular Knots by Sana Raoof, 17 of Jericho High School in Jericho, New York.

Yi-Han’s abstract is as follows:

“In industry, high-activity catalyst is desirable for methanol reforming reaction in order to generate hydrogen efficiently. In the project, multi-composition Cu-Zn-Al catalyst was synthesized by homogeneous precipitation (HP) method with urea treatment. In comparison with those obtained from conventional co-precipitation method, our technique offers an opportunity to improve the homogeneity of metal mixing and to increase the surface area of catalysts. By adjusting urea concentration, water amount, reaction temperature and time, various hydrotalcite-like compounds are obtained. The optimized catalysts having flower-like morphology exhibited high surface area (78.5 m2/g, as determined by Brunaer-Emmett-Teller method), and a lower reduction temperature. The HP-method derived Cu-Zn-Al catalyst exhibited higher methanol conversion, hydrogen production rate, and CO2-selectivity under methanol reforming reaction at 523K compared with those derived by co-precipitation method. To further improve the catalytic performance of the Cu-Zn-Al, Ce and Zr were employed to modify the support. The Ce/Zr-modified catalysts did show higher activity as evidence by a 20K lower reduction temperature and more than 85% of methanol coversion. Our method can be generalized for the synthesis of other multi-composition materials with high homogeneity.”