“We found what looks like stamped or painted marks that could be from the original manufacturer,” said Kenan Ünlü, director of RSEC and professor of nuclear engineering. “D24 and 335, or maybe 385. We don’t know what they mean, but they are the first new information from this panel that has been examined by various experts with different scientific techniques for over 30 years.”
Gillespie is now consulting with forensic analysts to decipher the six characters and what they might represent. If they can conclusively determine what the marks mean, such as a production number, it could confirm the panel came from Earhart’s plane. It could also definitely rule out the possibility.
“My mission — the mission of TIGHAR — is to use science to help solve aviation mysteries,” Gillespie said. “Whether this information provides more evidence or disproves that the panel belonged to Earhart’s plane, I’ll be glad to know.”
It’s not the end of the story for the aluminum panel and certainly not for the RSEC neutron imaging facility, according to Ünlü.
“We refined the facility with this old panel as a sample, and now we’re applying the technique to a far more contemporary challenge: distribution of microplastics in environment,” Ünlü said.
Microplastics — the particles that remain as plastic products break down — are ubiquitous across the planet and classified as an “emerging pollutant,” according to the National Center for Environmental Health and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Despite their prevalence, little is understood about how they disperse and their effects, Ünlü said.
Alibek Kenges, a doctoral student in nuclear engineering at Penn State, is part of the RSEC team and is now leading the efforts to visualize microplastics with neutron radiography and tomography as his dissertation project.
“Microplastics are everywhere, in sand, soil, water, etcetera — we’re trying to figure out how they get there,” Kenges said. “First, we examined scoops of sand to keep the samples as close to as in situ as possible. The neutron imaging technique works perfectly: the resulting image doesn’t show the sand at all, but the microplastics, from a millimeter to a few millimeters in size, light up like Christmas lights.”
Buoyed by the success of that test, Kenges is now examining different types of filtration materials used to sieve microplastics from water samples. He found that the neutron imaging approach could potentially be used to detect microplastics in the water filters, but the technique needs refinement to account for uncertainties related to parts of the imaging system.
“Now, we’re performing controlled experiments, where we already know the microplastic content and type, to establish the detection limits of our system and to fine-tune the methodology,” Kenges said.
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