STEM-In-Action Fall Follow-Up: Antastic Acids

It’s that time of year again. With the buzz surrounding #ecyber20 registration, it’s time to circle back to our winners from last year’s STEM-in-Action grant. If you are new to eCYBERMISSION, the U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) STEM-In-Action Grant awards eCYBERMISSION teams up to $5,000 to develop their projects into mature and scalable solutions in their community. We are checking in with teams after a few months since they received the grant, to see how their projects are turning out and what’s next for them. First, we head to Alabama to catch up with the Antastic Acids…

--

Hello everyone! We are team Antastic Acids writing from Madison, Alabama. We participated in the 2019 eCYBERMISSION competition and created a process that uses organic solvents to separate the layers of otherwise unrecyclable plastic packaging waste. This year we are working on using eCYBERMISSION’s STEM-In-Action Grant to implement our recycling process in our community.

Antastic Acids winning first place for 8th grade at Nationals.

The first step was to protect the intellectual property of our process before approaching companies to seek partnerships. We decided to do this by applying for a patent. We used the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website and Google Patents to conduct a patent search on prior art related to our process. We used this information to compare our process with existing processes and methods for layer separation. We scheduled a consultation with a patent attorney who lives in our area. We decided to approach her because she has a degree in biotechnology, science, and engineering which will likely help her understand our project better than most attorneys. After introducing our process to our attorney, we got her approval to begin writing the process of our patent application. We plan to show it to her to get her feedback on it before submitting it to the USPTO.

Through several meetings held on the weekends, we have written a draft for our patent application. We have identified the need to perform further experimentation regarding the effects of ultrasound on our process to support certain claims in our patent. This will help support the uniqueness of our project which will improve the chances of granting the patent. For the experiments with ultrasound, we looked for an ultrasonic horn that we could purchase within our budget. After a few searches, our team found an ultrasonic horn with 450 watts power. The ultrasonic horn along with its controller costs $1292 and fits within budget so we decided to buy it. The horn is currently being shipped to us and it will arrive soon for our experiments. We also used $42.70 for a magnetic stirrer as well as a hot plate with a temperature controller which will be critical in keeping the experiment controlled. Once this process is complete, we can look into implementing our process in local recycling plants and collaborating with plants in the recycling industry.

--

So many amazing things this team is up to! Perhaps when we catch up with them in the Spring they will have a “patent pending”! Who knows? Anything is possible with STEM.

-Mission Control