Our Inspiration
Our team name is Shell Shocked; we are a group of students in 9th grade enrolled in a STEM program at our school. We came up with the idea to take the technology of a shell and put it into a phone case. Our idea was inspired by an article that one person from our team had read one day. One morning one of our team members dad was coming home from church with their sibling. They were passing out pamphlets, and their dad had taken one. When he got home, he gave it to our team member and told them to look through because it had some science articles in it. These could be useful for our expo project inspiration. It did! They turned to the last page, and there was a little article about how strong shells are and what they could be used for in the future. This gave us our idea for our expo project present day.
Closer Look
This applies to a closer look because we are taking a look at something that naturally occurs in nature and is naturally strong. First, we initially thought that the macrostructure was where the shell got its strength. This is the physical shape of the shell. The real strength is on the inside. A shell has a brick like structure allowing the force to be distributed to the outer parts of the shell when force is applied; causing no harm to the inside of the shell.
What's the Problem?
Many people break or damage their phones or computers. To prevent this, we came up with the idea of using the microstructure of a shell to protect them. According to LifeLine Repairs, they found that 30% of people who break their phone in a 12-month time frame are likely to break it again. More than 6 billion dollars are spent in repairing smartphones every year. This is a problem that a lot of people face. According to Shell Shocked's market survey on average, that the minority; 22% of our responders have not broken their phone. But all the people who have on average have spent money to get their phones fixed paid 126 - 140 dollars or more. This shows that 56.8 percent of our responders have broken their phone and paid to get it fixed. Shell Shocked wants to fix this problem. Our cases will prolong the life of smartphones when they’re dropped and prevent cracked and shattered screens so consumers can be happy and keep their money in their pocket! But we also want to reduce the amount of e-waste that unusable or broken phones create. E-waste has many effects on us and our planet. E-waste can affect our air, water, and soil, which over time can affect everything we need to survive. According to our Infographic when e-waste sits in landfills chemicals and metals leach into the ground contaminating our groundwater. Making it unclean and undrinkable. See more HERE
Our Solution
Our solution is to design a phone case that will reduce the risk of your phone breaking when its dropped. We will do this by mimicking the microstructure of shells. The microstructure is made out of small bricks fused together with proteins and other organic materials that make the bricks flexible when absorbing impact. The bricks slide when an impact is absorbed. We are not going to build our phone case because we don't have the technology that is capable of utilizing and mimicking the microstructure of a shell on a microscopic level, but we indeed did prove that our concept would work. But with more extensive research and development, one day this could be an actual product that mimics the microscopic bricks and protein/organic mortar of a bivalve shell. We are just proving that our idea would work or also know as proof of concept. But if we were to build this phone case, we would hope to mimic the structure of a shell in our phone case. Click HERE to see how we are addressing the problem of e-waste with our community.