Student wins travel

Press, 29 September 1988, Page 9

Student wins travel

Winning the premier award in the 1.C.1. New Zealand School Science Fair is just the beginning for a Christchurch student, Andrew Richards. He also won the Kiwanis travel award — a trip to San Diego in April, where he will be a guest exhibitor at a science fair. Andrew Richards, aged 17, a seventh-former at Burnside High School, won the premier award of a trophy and $5OO as well as the travel award to the San Diego Science and Engineering Fair. The New Zealand fair was held in Dunedin earlier this month.

Andrew Richards’s project proved the synthesis of superconducting materials and demonstrated magnetic levitation (known as the Meissner Effect). "It was a lot of work but the fair was really interesting,” he said. He plans to study for a B.Sc. in physics at the University of Canterbury next year but first has to sit bursary examinations. Although the principle of superconductivity was discovered in 1911, recent discoveries have given the principle wider applications. Supercon du ctors

needed to be cooled to super-cold temperatures to reduce resistance, Andrew Richards said. But the discoveries had lifted the cold temperatures from about —2oodeg. C to about —lBodeg., making the process easier and cheaper. Superconductors are used for body-scanning instead of harmful X-rays, and for creating powerful magnetic fields. This has value for rail and other forms of transport. “It is a really interesting area and there is a lot of money being poured into research for it,” Andrew Richards said.