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Teenagers win international award for green solution

Suprihatin (left) and Raafi Jaya Sutrisna (JP/Teressa Warianto)Raafi Jaya Sutrisna and Suprihatin, two students in Pati, Central Java, may only be 17 years old, but they already have the makings of great inventors

Teressa Warianto (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Mon, August 29, 2016

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Teenagers win international award for green solution

Suprihatin (left) and Raafi Jaya Sutrisna (JP/Teressa Warianto)

Raafi Jaya Sutrisna and Suprihatin, two students in Pati, Central Java, may only be 17 years old, but they already have the makings of great inventors.

They saw a problem in their hometown, tried to turn it into an opportunity and won an international award for it.

Pati, a small town with a booming tapioca industry, produces tons of cassava skin waste each month, which prompted Raafi and Suprihatin to look for a sustainable solution to deal with the waste.  

The two teenagers, who worked on the project at their school, SMA PGRI 2 in Kayen district, created a cassava skin composite that can serve as an environmentally friendly alternative for raw materials in the production of planes, trains and automobiles.

 “The inspiration for our invention came from waste. We saw a huge waste problem in our town and we wanted to find a way to reduce it,” said Raafi, who is now in his first year at Semarang’s Diponegoro University majoring in chemical engineering.

It took them one year of research in their high school’s science club to transform the waste product into composites that could be used as raw materials.  

“We took fibers from cassavas and banana trees one by one and cut each fiber into 2-millimeter sections,” Raafi said.

The fiber is then mixed with resin and catalyst in order to create a composite.

“The composite can be used as raw material in the production of car bumpers, airplane interiors or ship bodies,” Suprihatin said.  

The unused cassava and banana skin composites are environmentally friendly and fireproof, and can be used in a whole range of industries.   

“We’re trying to develop our research further so that we’re not just limited to cassava or bananas but so that we can develop composites from any sort of natural fiber and use them as a raw material alternative,” Raafi said.  

Like other scientists, their research process involved a certain amount of trial and error. “During our first attempt to mold the composites, we made it manually but the mold turned out to contain voids that weakened the bond between the fiber and the matrix,” Raafi said.

They restarted their research taking a different approach. This time, they used a machine that they designed themselves, which minimized the voids in the mold.

Their groundbreaking research has won these two bright minds a number of international accolades. They won the Indonesian Science Project Olympiade (ISPO) in 2015, beating more than 1,000 research projects from around the country.

They later brought their research to the International Young Inventors Project Olympiad (IYIPO) held on April 24 this year in Georgia. After competing against more than 100 research projects from more than 35 countries around the world, the two teenagers snatched the gold in the physics category.

The two attracted the attention of German technology supplier Bosch and the company gave them funding to continue their research after they returned to their home country.

They will compete against two other groups of Indonesian young inventors in a social media competition to win a trip to visit the company’s research and development center and other technology centers in Germany.

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— The writer is an intern at The Jakarta Post

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