TOWAMENCIN - North Penn High School’s Engineering Academy students could have a new toy to play with as soon as this fall: a scanning electron microscope.
At least, that’s what NPHS technology teacher Mike Boyer is after, and he’s one step closer now that a grant application seeking money for the SEM was approved by the district’s school board.
“It’s a long shot, but if they’re willing to hear from me, I’m willing to put the time in to write the grant and get the process moving,” said Boyer.
“After all, how many other high schools are electrospinning polymer nanofibers?” he said.
Electrospinning, he’ll explain to you, is a process of applying high-voltage charges of 10,000 to 30,000 volts to a viscous polymer solution to create an ultra-fine filament, while an electrostatic pull jets the fiber out of the solution, kind of like taking taffy and pulling it into thin, thread-like pieces.
That’s one of the tasks Engineering Academy students have learned to do over the past five years, in advanced classes that Boyer, a 1992 NPHS graduate, teaches as part of the high school’s The Future is NEAR — Nanotechnology Education And Research — program.
Currently, the students have to commute to Drexel University in order to use a scanning electron microscope there to analyze and evaluate their work, but grant money from the Toshiba America Foundation could solve that problem.
“We’ve been going down once or twice a year to analyze the students’ work, and back when we started in 2005-06 the work was relatively basic: they were doing pure research, analyzing what happens if they change one variable in the nanospinning process and seeing what that does to the nanofibers it makes,” Boyer said.
Simple stuff, right? Well, it turns out that students over the past five years have been able to build on the research done by the grades before them, and are putting their nanotechnology knowledge to more advanced uses, like encapsulating drugs within nanofibers smaller than human hairs, finding ways to create artificial skin for burn victims, and embedding nanofibers with different substances that can stunt the growth of virus bacteria.
“They’re developing some pretty awesome applied research that can be used to solve global issues, things like energy conservation and health care, and the students are now developing and designing experiments where they’re producing tangible, and maybe in some cases patentable, results,” Boyer said.
The problem is that no optical microscope comes close to being able to measure the changes students are making, so that’s why Boyer is seeking the $65,000 grant from the Toshiba America Foundation to fully fund the acquisition of a scanning electron microscope for the high school.
“We need SEM access, and a lot of it. We can’t just run the SEM once a year, it’s something that we need access to several times a month, if not for some students several times a week, because of some of the things these kids are coming up with,” said Boyer.
“For example, if we develop a hollow nanofiber that we can embed particles in, instead of going to Drexel in March or April and just finding out if their experiments worked or didn’t work, if we had a SEM in class, they could analyze their work in that same class period,” he said.
Believe it or not, there are companies that manufacture and sell portable SEMs that are roughly 2 by 2 by 2 cubic feet, and that $65,000 price tag includes several discounts he’s already been able to identify.
“I hear back from students all the time about some of the things they’re doing in college, and tell them, ‘Don’t forget about us when you hit the big time,’ just in case the grant doesn’t come through, but we’re just waiting to see what happens and if this comes to fruition,” he said.
If they don’t secure the grant, Boyer added, he just might have to unleash all of that brainpower toward coming up with fundraisers, and he’s open to suggestions and feedback from other NPHS departments that would put the SEM to good use too.
“I plan on opening it up to our entire science department. We could use it with our forensics lab, Principles of Engineering could use it to do stress analysis, actually breaking materials and determining how and why it broke, measuring the electrostatic discharge of circuits by breaking chips open and determining why or how they failed,” said Boyer.
“There are so many opportunities to give these kids a true, cutting-edge education, and we want to keep getting them started now, because once they get to college, they all tell me they’re starting leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else,” he said.
To learn more about the NPHS Engineering Academy and The Future Is NEAR program, visit www.TheFutureIsNEAR.org
