Engineering Innovation Challenge
By The Institution of Engineers, Singapore and Science Centre Singapore
The Engineering Innovation Challenge (EIC) aims to interest, excite and enable students to understand and experience engineering. This year’s theme is “Radiation is everywhere” and teams had a choice of coming up with a product that is either a self-made ionizing radiation detector or one that incorporates an ionizing radiation detector function. Through this challenge, we had the opportunity to work with academics, professionals, and business mentors to design and build our product.
As future demands for electricity are forecast to increase and with its emissions, Southeast Asia is a region hungry for electricity and growing hungrier by 6 percent every year, one of the fastest rates in the world, according to a 2019 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). However, as public support for nuclear energy is at a record low and with some opposed to it, we would like to break the misconception while equipping and improving the public sentiment on nuclear energy.
Therefore, we came up with an online dashboard that reflects the real-time radiation level in the area of concern called New-Clear. Through the dashboard interface, users are able to explore the radiation level across the past week and plan their travel routes to avoid areas with high radiation. New-Clear will remain an open and transparent platform to provide critical information to reduce the exposure to radiation that can cause long-term health risks and complications to those who live close to nuclear power plants. When civilian nuclear energy does and if it becomes proliferated the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), our team believes that we can play our part by empowering locals who live in close proximity to nuclear power plants to know the radiation levels around them.
In addition to making sense of the data, we want to educate the public on nuclear energy. Through our team’s in-depth study of radiation and its harmful effects, we realized that educating through teaching the public to build and deploy their self-made Geiger counter will not only educate but give them the assurance that the data collection is not modified and tapered by us. We have decided that our remote Geiger counters called NEW-PLANT symbolizes a community garden culture where every citizen will “plant” a self-made Geiger counter in their homes and play a part and contributing to the community-wide capture of radiation levels. NEW-PLANT toolkits will be given out to citizens living in proximity to nuclear power plants. NEW-PLANTs are self-made Geiger counters to detect and measure radioactivity while sending data to the cloud which is then pushed to the dashboard. Through New-Clear and New-Plant, we are ready when civilian nuclear energy to provide clean and sustainable energy becomes common in ASEAN.
We Clinched the 1st Runner up!
Special thanks to our mentors: Teo Shin Jen • Chew Choon Seng• Geoffrey Brown • Massimiliano Colla • Remek Lipinski
