Thinking of ways to reduce the impact of pollution is on everyone's minds. This is how 14-year-old Vinisha Umashankar, a student of SKP Vanitha International School in Tamil Nadu, is doing her part to save the planet.
In October 2018, Vinisha saw an ironing worker throw a few pieces of hot charcoal on the pathway and then pour water on it. When asked why he was doing that, he explained that he was cooling the hot charcoal before he could throw it into the dustbin.
On reaching home, she did a little quick research on the Internet and learnt that to make 1kg of charcoal, 12 fully-grown trees need to be cut down. Apart from that, burning of coal emits harmful gases like carbon monoxide. That is when she started to think of alternative sources of heat to iron clothes, and the first idea that popped into her mind was solar energy. While Vinisha knew that solar energy can be harnessed (利用)to generate power, she did not know how. So she referred to college-level Physics books.
By September 2019, Vinisha had finished working on the technical paper. Impressed with her work, her father submitted her paper to different competitions and soon it was picked up by a group of engineers at the National Innovation Foundation, Ahmedabad, who helped make the prototype (雏形).The ironing cart has solar panels as the roof, which is connected to 100ah battery. Once the battery is fully charged it will power the steam iron box for six hours. Apart from that, the cart has USB ports which can be used to charge mobile phones, too.
The approximate cost of this ironing cart is yet to be determined, and for the future, Vinisha hopes to use her prize money to deploy (配置)a few ironing carts in her hometown and get feedback from the ironing workers.
