| www . Science-Projects . com |
Designing Public Buildings So They Don't Contribute to the Spread of Disease
As all of you students and your teachers should be aware, every time you put your hand on a railing or doorknob or faucet in your school, you could be picking up bacteria and viruses from anyone of the hundreds who put their hands there in the last day or so. Thus your public buildings can very well be vectors of disease - carrying pathogens from one person to another. The goal of this project can be subdivided into two sub-goals:
Obviously, either of these projects has to do with "stuff" (material) that somehow sterilizes itself rather quickly. Thus we enter the realm of "materials science" and a rarely studied area of self-sterilization. Interestingly, the North American and Northern European coinage that you carry around is intensionally self-sterilizing. (But that trait is so little known, that even experts in the field of numismatics usually don't know about it - but the nations' health officials do, and mandate that their mints make their coins out of certain metals!) This should be a very big hint as to how to gain entry into this project. But how to test for the capacity of self-sterilization becomes the operative question. For that you will need to contact the webmaster, a microbiologist, for help as there are probably many different ways to run your experiments.
With regard to retrofitting, there are, of course, two ways to go about it: either replace the existing fixtures, or coat them with some type of self-sterilizing material. While new construction in the above paragraph is the more exciting, retrofitting will be the most needed method. It is suspected that applying some of the self-sterilizing materials in the above paragraph to coatings will be the answer. It may be just that simple, but it must be proved!
Only one student so far has worked on this project - Katherine in Houston, Texas. Anyway, contact this webmaster with your thoughts, and they will be discussed back and forth several times, plans can be devised to pursue whichever method you choose, and continuing guidance can be given all the way through one or more presentations. Remember, there are no "cookbook" (established) methods for doing this. This website proposes original projects - you have to come up with the methods! And that's what makes these projects good for presenting at real scientific society meetings. It is suspected that results in either or both of these projects - new construction and retrofitting - will catch the eyes of the press, and you might suddenly become very popular as a presenter at meetings dealing with architectural design and public health. (It will be expected that you will coauthor your work with Katherine when the time comes for presentations outside of your school.)
|Site's Table of Contents | Site's Index |