Four boys have been awarded the CREST Gold award for scientific innovation. This week the Head Master presented certificates to Arnav Jain (NA), Edgar Strugar (JDM), Rhodri Whiteley (College) and Chris Yacoumatos (College). Rhodri tells the story:
“The project began with a visit to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories for the Scheme Launch Day. We were introduced to our link engineer, Chris Ashton, and Glaxo Smith Klein’s school liaison, Michelle Davis from GSK. They gave us the task of improving the cooling stage on their NPI ‘Flexicell’ Value Stream production line, the production line used to produce Sensodyne toothpaste. (The toothpaste max is heated to react with the constituent chemicals and then cooled in vats.) We spent six months analysing the data we were given from each separate cooling vat, and a month writing up our solutions. In brief, we recommended installing electronic monitoring systems to regulate both temperature and mass, as there was significant economic loss due to both over-heating and irregular masses of toothpaste being cooled per batch. In addition to this, we used numerical analysis to find an optimum flow-rate for the cooling of the toothpaste. We then went to the Rutherford and Appleton Laboratories for the Celebration and Assessment Day. Here, we handed in our report of our work to the assessors and gave a PowerPoint summarising the details. For this we were awarded the CREST Gold award. GSK now plans to incorporate our ideas into their systems.”
