This 17-Year-Old Engineering Student Solved One of the Biggest Problems with Air Travel
Two years ago Raymond Wang, a 17-year-old Canadian student and aspiring CFD engineer, won the top prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), taking home the $75,000 Gordon E. Moore Award for solving one of the biggest problems with air travel and revolutionize air quality inside cabins.
How did he get there? Back in December 2015, when the news was flooded with reports about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa — a problem immediately caught Raymond’s attention. While Ebola is not airborne, other contagious diseases — including the H1N1 flu, SARS virus and of course the common cold — are. And that can be a serious problem for the passengers in the cramped confines of airplane cabins, where everyone is breathing the same air and spreading all the germs and infections to other passengers.
“With the traditional cabin, what’s happening is you’ve got two large, turbulent swirls. You’re spreading disease across the rows and longitudinally”, says Wang. In other words — when someone sneezes on a plane, particles go flying all over the place.
This is a problem we at SimScale have explored as well — the simulation you see to the right was performed on our cloud-based CFD platform. Last year Kristina — one of our Business Developers at SimScale — even won our internal SimScalator competition for this passive scalar fluid flow simulation of a sneezing process in an aircraft.
Here’s How a CFD Engineer Solved This Problem
Once you understand the behavior of airflow, it is possible to find ways of manipulating it and to make well-informed decisions about design adjustments.
Raymond Wang used the simulation data to eventually come up with simple fin-shaped devices that could be integrated into the plane inlet system. By redirecting the airflow, this device would create “walls of air” around each passenger, pushing the sneeze particles out of the cabin before they spread to any of the other passengers. According to Wang, his innovative and cost-efficient design would improve the air quality in the cabin by 190%, he said, and reduce the airborne germs concentration 55 times — all for a mere $1,000 of hardware and installation costs [1].
Software, Hardware, and Expertise — No Longer a Barrier
The invention is even more impressive when we consider the fact that Raymond Wang learned CFD from scratch by himself, watching tutorial videos and reading papers. The complexity of the multiphysics involved in engineering simulation has long intimidated engineers with limited expertise in numerical analysis. But if some are still skeptical that Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) is democratizing — there is no better proof than this story. With the abundance of learning resources and simulation templates freely available, any engineer or designer can learn to leverage simulation to improve existing products or come up with something entirely new and innovative. In particular, our CFD Master Class is aimed at empowering CFD engineers to do just that.
Costly hardware and software required to perform CFD simulations is another barrier discouraging many design engineers from implementing their innovative ideas. Raymond Wang was lucky to get noticed for his talent and got sponsored by a major CFD software vendor, but this is not an option many can exploit. This posed a serious obstacle until cloud-based CFD platforms presented an alternative solution, granting anyone access to engineering simulation with flexible subscription-based pricing plans and remotely accessible computing power — eliminating the last hurdle that was deterring many engineers from leveraging simulation in their work.
Getting Started
This is just one example out of a multitude of real life problems a motivated CFD engineer can solve. Others include cooling of electronics, especially the devices that need to operate under special conditions, such as underwater; ventilation systems of cleanrooms for pharmaceutical research and other activities performed under controlled environment; aerodynamic optimization of sports devices — and the list goes on. The technology to solve many of the real life problems we face is already there, all that is missing is someone dedicated enough to apply it.
Raymond Wang’s success is certainly a story any CFD engineer or determined individual (even without an engineering background) can draw inspiration from — who hasn’t dreamed of coming up with something groundbreaking and making a real change? And while a desire to make a difference may not be enough, and in order to translate a brilliant idea into practice, powerful tools are often necessary — and they no longer have the barriers they once had. If you are someone with great ideas and are in need of a scalable, less investment-intensive tool to bring them to life — look no further.
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[1] Raymond Wang’s Official Website, http://www.raycorpglobal.com/
Originally published at www.simscale.com on June 12, 2017.
