Youth Tackles Global Warming

Thousands of students across the country complete science fair projects every year, and many struggle to find a topic.

Not Jonathan Riska. When the seventh grader from Macungie, Pa. decided to enter the 2007 Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Science State Fair, he turned directly to his interests outside the classroom for inspiration, and used Minitab Statistical Software to act on it. “I like cars and engines,” Riska said. “And I’m very concerned about where energy will come from in the future.”

Riska’s project compared the amount of energy contained in different vegetable oils to that in petroleum diesel fuel. “Vegetable oils are the raw materials for making biodiesel, which may eventually replace petroleum diesel,” he says. “They can even be used straight in a diesel engine if they are preheated. I wanted to confirm whether vegetable oils can be considered reasonable replacements for petroleum diesel.”

To test safflower, peanut, corn, olive, and coconut oils, Riska built a simple calorimeter, which measures the energy per gram in a fuel by determining how much of it must be burned to raise the temperature of water.

For each fuel, Riska filled his burner and recorded its initial mass. He then lit the fuel and began recording the water temperature. When it rose to about 80 degrees C, he extinguished the burner and reweighed the fuel sample. Together, these measurements gave Riska the information he needed to calculate the amount of energy per gram in each fuel.

But Riska took it a step further. He also tested petroleum diesel, methanol, and n-dodecane, which all have known energy contents. He then used these measurements to calibrate his simple calorimeter, making his data more accurate.

When it came time to analyze his data, Riska tried using Microsoft Excel, but the results were disappointing. “My dad uses Minitab at work, and he saw my Excel plots and thought that I could do better with Minitab,” he says.

“Within forty minutes I was making my first graphs with Minitab. It was really easy to use—much easier than Excel. I really liked Minitab’s ability to make ‘right click’ changes to every feature of a graph. I was able to produce cool plots of my data that really made the results clear.”

Riska’s data showed that vegetable oils may well provide viable fuels for the future. “I found that most vegetable oils have about the same energy as petroleum diesel fuel—actually, about 15 percent less, but close enough to work well,” he says. “This is good news. Also, the vegetable oils burned much cleaner than petroleum diesel, which was very smelly and gave off a lot of soot. I particularly liked the coconut oil—burning it gave off a pleasant, coconutty aroma.”

His final presentation included a Minitab-generated histogram detailing each of his measurements, a plot that explained how he calibrated the calorimeter to ensure the accuracy of his data, and a bar chart that plainly shows the energy contents of each vegetable oil are approximately equal, and close to that of petroleum diesel.

Using Minitab to follow his passion paid off - Riska’s project took a 1st place award at the Science Fair. “I believe I got the award because I was able to show very practical and meaningful results from such a simple homemade instrument,” he says. “And I was able to present the results clearly, thanks to Minitab.”

In fact, analyzing his data with Minitab turned out to be one of the easier tasks in Riska’s project. “The most difficult part was keeping the burner lit,” he says. “All I had available were wicks from old laboratory alcohol burners, which worked well for some oils but not for others. I had to heat some oils up in a double boiler just to get them to flow through the wick.”

We can’t guarantee that all students who use Minitab will win awards for their science projects—or solve the world’s energy problems. But understanding statistics is easier when you use Minitab Statistical Software to make the concepts interesting and easy to apply.