Students apply science to real world projects

Advanced chemistry students at Whitefish High School recently wrapped up year-long research projects that applied science to the world around them.

Some students looked at properties of ice cream, one pair tested bone cement and another team sound tested drums.

Teacher Todd Spangler charged students with selecting a topic, researching, talking with professionals, developing a plan and then completing the research.

Spangler said the project makes the students move beyond the classroom.

“These are real world projects,” he said. “They have to work through dead ends and they don’t know where they’ll end up. They become experts on the topics.”

Students presented their findings to classmates.

Sam Donaldson and Iaian Cameron used cow femur bones to test the strength of bone cement.

“We were interested in the engineering of medical products,” Donaldson said. “We landed on bone cement and wanted to see what kind of force the cement can withstand.”

Bone cement is used to anchor artificial joints by filling the space between the prosthesis and the bone. The cement has to absorb the forces acting on the body to ensure the artificial implants stay in place over a long period of time.

Over the course of the year Donaldson and Cameron performed different types of weight tests on the cement to simulate the different forces in the human body. They attached metal hooks to the bone with the cement and then used weights to see what would cause the metal to separate from the bone.

“We wanted to simulate how much raw force the cement can withstand,” Donaldson said. “The bone cement was pretty strong. People with this substance in their body shouldn’t be worried because it’s quite a bit of force it can handle.”

Emma Marchetti and Hania Koziol’s project was to test algae fertilizer against standard commercial fertilizer. The project came out of their interest in the Algae AquaCulture Technology plant at F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber.

The company has been working for several years to create its Green Power House, which uses wood waste from Stoltze to grow algae and convert it into methane, as well as to yield a byproduct in the form of soil fertilizer. The pair visited the Algae AquaCulture test site and worked with the professional there to form their experiment.

“I’m interested in environmental sciences and sustainability,” Marchetti said. “We will be able to compare our results to theirs. It benefited their process and business along with our academic interests.”

For the experiment they planted wheatgrass in varying conditions including in soil, wood chips and water. They diluted the algae fertilizer and the commercial fertilizer in water and then used the two types of fertilizer to water the plants. They found that in certain growing conditions the plants grew better in the algae versus the commercial fertilizer.

Autumn Fisher and Andrea Lamoureux took a concern from a community member and turned it into their project. They attempted to determine if an increasing number of railroad trains passing through Whitefish would impact the air quality. They said the project is important as a larger number of trains carrying oil and coal pass through town.

The pair set up a DustTrak meter during several 24-hour monitoring periods. They measured the particulate levels of houses near the train tracks and also at the Whitefish Depot.

Despite several tests, they weren’t able to come to a definite conclusion. One hindrance to the test was their inability to obtain train schedules from either BNSF Railway or Amtrak.

“There’s just too much in the air for us to specifically say if it was the train that caused a spike in dust,” Fisher said. “Something is impacting the air at times, but we couldn’t say what it was.”