Friends, please read the following text and ask just ANY question that comes to your mind. First make sure that you’ve understood it and then ask questions taking yourself as a judge. Actually, we r going to face dozens of questions tomorrow by real judges on the spot… I just ant to see what types of questions come in your minds…. Well this post is about the National Science Congress Competition in which @Tirtharaj Dhar, @Arghadeep Sarkar and I am taking part as a team....And the subject we chose is Studying the adsorptive property of tea factory waste and performing a comparative study about the diseases occurring amongst the tea factory workers against the motor vehicle drivers.... Now firstly, the first substance we are working with is tea factory waste which is a thin fibrous substance separated from the actual tea material because of its commercial uselessness. However it is also sometimes used to separate heavy metals from water by the process of adsorption.(Adsorption is the adhesion of atoms, ions, or molecules from a gas, liquid, or dissolved solid to a surface). So we wanted to see if it could act as an adsorbent in water, could it also adsorb materials from air? So we performed an experiment of checking its adsorptive capacity. To do this, we took tea factory waste(TFW), activated charcoal, and some other fibers like coir, jute, etc and put them in conical flasks first to perform experiment. (Activated charcoal was used as it was a known and effective adsorbent of dust particles in air… It is also used in air purifier) .Other fibers, after acid- washing (a process with dil. H2SO4) also are known to be good adsorbents. So we checked whether TFW could do it or not. We also used an empty conical flask for the matter of comparison. Well, results were contradictory after two smoke tests(i.e., keeping the substances in empty conical flasks and checking the adsorption of smoke by those substances by keeping a burning paper nearby them in the conical flasks and observing the samples after regular intervals of time). First time activated charcoal came up victorious. But next time TFW won. So, as we couldn’t take two winners. We decided to perform an odor test with sublimable substances like Camphor, Naphthalene, etc, we also used incense stick and checked their adsorptive capacity by the same process i.e, same way by keeping in closed conical flasks….and checked the odor no. of times after regular intervals and by different wards. The result came up successful as we had expected… Tea factory waste came up as the 2nd best as adsorbent after activated charcoal. Another part of our project was checking the amount of respiratory problem facers amongst the tea factory workers working in the sorting room against the motor vehicle drivers. We conducted a survey by enquiring about the diseases faced by them by asking direct questions and came up with a result that 76% of the tea factory workers were sufferers while 62% among the vehicle drivers. Though we made an assumption of our correctness as our sample size wasn’t that big, we are hopeful they are close. We assumed teas factory workers as vulnerable to respiratory tract diseases for a reason. The reason of our survey was---- during sorting the tree into different grades, some very tiny particles called ‘tea fluff’ are released into the air which are harmful for health. Its quantity is so much that layers of them get deposited on the side walls. So we proved that tea factory workers are at a greater risk of respiratory tract diseases than normal people. Now ask AAANNNYYYY question regarding this topic
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 15:38:42 +0000
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