Former John Paul College student Cian Hinton has been selected by the Royal Society Te Aparāngi to represent New Zealand at the Taiwan International Science Fair next week.
Hinton, who finished his final year at school last year, will attend the fair with Liam Hewson, a former student of King's High School in Dunedin.
Hinton researched, designed and tested a hydro-electric generator that was an entirely original design. His interest and curiosity in this field of physics and engineering was born from his idea that electricity should be able to be generated in the same way that charged particles are accelerated around the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.
The design process has taken Hinton more than five years and he has pursued more than 14 different concepts of this generator. Some didn't make it past the drawing board, while others have been made into working models.
He considered the wider application of his design and, in particular, he would love to see it provide universal access to electricity in third world countries for use in medical care and communication.
