Students found alternative fuel for school buses

By Megan Mitchell, YourHub

FEDERAL HEIGHTS – Four former STEM students from Pinnacle Charter School in Federal Heights made science cool for the entire school after they each brought home $2,000 from a national science fair in Disney World last June.

Tiffany Nguyen, 13, left, Thomas Nguyen, 13, Salvador Barron, 14, Ricardo Damian, 14, and instructor Michele King pose for a portrait on Sept. 27 at Pinnacle Charter School in Denver. (Seth McConnell, YourHub)

“There’s a waiting list to get on the STEM team this year,” said Pinnacle eighth-grade science teacher and STEM coach Michele King.

The 2012-2013 team, Ricardo Damian, 14, Salvador Barron, 14, Tiffany Nguyen, 13, and her brother Thomas Nguyen, 13 – collectively called the Biodiesel Weasels – won the Gold Medal Award at the Christopher Columbus National Science Fair for synthesizing biodiesel fuel to top off their district’s school buses.

“When we first started the project it was a nerd thing,” Tiffany said. “After we won then everyone wanted to know about it.”

The Biodiesel Weasels started by identifying a problem with the increasing price of transportation for students.

Last year, it cost $100 for each Pinnacle student to ride the bus to school. Discounts previously offered to families vanished completely.

“The fees are getting really hard for a lot of families to handle,” King said. “And so we thought ‘let’s do something community-oriented that our school can benefit from.’ “

So they crunched some numbers, and as it turned out, the school could save an average of $16,000 a year if they topped off all 15 buses with five gallons of biodiesel fuel once a week.

To make the fuel, the Biodiesel Weasels met in the chemistry lab after school every Thursday for several months. They used vegetable oil donated from local restaurants and neutralized it with various chemicals. But it was a laborious process.

“It takes a really long time to make it by hand,” Barron said. “We can produce maybe five gallons a week on our own.”

Thankfully, the American Association of University Women gave the STEM team a grant to purchase a biodiesel processor, which would allow the team to make upwards of 100 gallons of fuel every week without going through the trial and error of neutralizing each batch of oil.

That almost put the project in practice. King said the team still needs a $2,500 filtration system before it can start topping off the buses.

Read the full article by Megan Mitchell from YourHub.