The Met Section and Polytechnic University hosted the New York City Regional Future City Competition on January 19, 2008. Help from volunteers from ASCE Metropolitan Section and Polytechnic University made this another successful year for the competition. Thirty one teams consisting of middle school students throughout the metropolitan region arrived at the Polytechnic University with excitement of presenting the product created by their five long months of effort.

The Future City Competition exposes the students to engineering and hopefully inspires them to pursue engineering careers. The competition also teaches the students about problem-solving, team work, research and presentation skills and computer skills. With help from the teachers and the mentors, the students use SimCity 3000 software to develop their future city design. The teams then write an essay and abstract on this year’s theme to “Keeping Our City Infrastructure Healthy: Using Nanotechnology to Monitor City Structures and Systems”. After the essay and abstracts, the fun part begins; the students build a scale model of their future city. Once the final product is complete, it’s off to the Regional Competition to present their city of the future to a panel of engineer judges.

Engineers and researchers contend that nanotechnology, generally described as technology and devices operating at the molecular level, offers limitless potential. The student’s essays describe how built-in nanotechnology within a single component of their city’s infrastructure, such as a tunnel or the water supply, monitors for safety. Additionally, the monitoring system were designed to resolve problems with a minimum of human intervention. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) was the sponsor of this year’s National Future City Competition.

Although the student’s essays, like their Future City designs, deal with hypothetical models, they are nonetheless rooted in reality. The competition encourages students to draw on resources such as the latest research in scientific papers and even interviews with top experts from around the globe. You can see the detail of their work as they describe the nanotechnology processes they use to protect the infrastructure of the city in the following excerpt from their essay…

“Maroga is a beautiful and environmentally friendly city located on the island of Sao Miguel. The only aspect of Maroga that is less than perfect is a dangerous stratovolcano. However, this volcano is critical to Maroga, as it is a huge tourist attraction, contributing vastly to the economical well-being of the city.

Stratovolcanoes are characterized by periodic explosive eruptions which can spew ash forty kilometers into the air and produce devastating mudflows and ash flows. Maroga uses nanotechnology sensors and force fields to protect its citizens from Pai, its stratovolcano. Sensors have been placed inside the volcano. If an eruption was going to occur, these sensors would activate a protective force field, called a dome, around the volcano.

Inside of the volcano, there are 100,000 sensors floating in the magma. Each sensor is 200 nanometers in diameter, 100 times stronger than steel, and one ten-thousandth of a human hair in diameter. These sensors are coated with a special nanomaterial called nanogel. The nanogel insulates the sensors and keeps heat from getting in, so that the sensors are not destroyed in the magma. These sensors are used to measure the pressure of gases inside of the magma that could cause the volcano to erupt. Volcanologists have calculated that the gas in magma produces 360 to 3600 pounds per square inch of pressure, which is equivalent to 25 to 250 bars.

The sensors are constantly transmitting the amount of pressure in gases to a control tower, using radio waves, eliminating the need for human intervention. Inside of the control tower are computers that analyze the pressure that the sensors transmit. If the amount of pressure is detected to be unsafe, a command from the control tower turns the force field on simultaneously, protecting the city from lava and ash of the eruption. This dome prevents explosive and hazardous ash from traveling to the populated areas around the volcano.

The dome is composed of carbon nanotubes, which merge together to form a high pressure nanotubes link, or nanowall, that acts as a net. The construction of the individual nanotubes can withhold the heat and pressure of the magma. The carbon material can withstand temperatures of 750˚ C, the temperature of lava. The pressure of the eruption is contained within the dome because the nanotubes are one of the strongest materials known, in terms of tensile strength and elasticity.”

The Regional Future City Competition is the culmination of months of planning, designing and hard work by the all the students, teachers and volunteers involved with this program. We couldn’t make this program a success without the more than 100 local engineers that volunteer to help with our program.

Special thanks go out to the New York City Regional Coordinator, Mrs. Karen Armfield, of ASCE Met Section and Dr. Noel Kriftcher of Polytechnic University’s David Packard Center for Technology and Educational Alliances. The continued support of this program from these organizations and the generosity of corporate sponsors from the engineering community allows hundreds of students each year the opportunity to experience the challenges of engineering first hand through a collaborative learning environment. Visit www.futurecity.org for more information. Here are some of the highlights from this year Competition:

2008 Regional Competition Award and Prize Winners

First Place “Maroga” Islip Middle School Islip, NY $5,000 Annual Student Scholarships
Second Place “Wincing Days” Phillipa Schuyler IS 383 Brooklyn, NY $2,000 Annual Student Scholarships Fourth Place “Dome City” Michelanglo MS 144 Bronx, NY	Third Place “Viltis” Stephen A. Halsey JHS 157 Rego Park, NY $1,000 Annual Student Scholarships Fifth Place “Great Neck South” Great Neck Middle School Great Neck, NY

2008 Special Award Winners and Sponsors