I am in awe of what this guy has already achieved at age 19. A
small percentage of the population but still many people graduate college at a
young age. Very very few bring water
and power to thousands of people on the far side of the world. Wow!
19-year-old engineer from North Bend puts smarts to work around the
world
Alexander Anderson, 19, of North Bend, talks about the airborne wind
turbine he built with money from a grant from the American Public Power
Association.
Alexander Anderson won a grant to build an airborne wind turbine — held
aloft by balloons and tethered to the ground. (Ellen M. Banner/The Seattle
Times)
The blades in the airborne wind turbine that Alexander Anderson
constructed are big and visible to bats and birds so not as many are killed,
unlike the current wind turbines. (Ellen M. Banner/The Seattle Times)
Alexander Anderson, 19, of North Bend, talks about the airborne wind
turbine he built with money from a grant from the American Public Power Association.
(Ellen M. Banner/The Seattle Times)
Alexander Anderson’s skills in mechanical and electrical engineering
have already brought clean drinking water to a village in Papua New Guinea.
Educating Alexander Anderson has been a family project.
His parents, Alex and Olga, recognized early on that their son was
unusually gifted. For the first dozen years they home-schooled him, with an
emphasis on the humanities and languages.
By the time he was 12, Alexander had surpassed his parents’ ability to
educate him.
They enrolled him at Green River College, but the college said it
couldn’t let a boy his age attend on his own, and the Andersons thought it
would be a waste of time to hang around while Alexander was in class.
So, everyone in the family went to school — first to community college,
then to Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, where all three earned degrees in
mechanical engineering.
Today Anderson, who is 19, has already amassed a list of
accomplishments worthy of a lifetime. Not only has the North Bend man earned a
master’s degree in electrical power engineering, he has also:
• Built and tested a low-cost, lightweight airborne wind turbine that
will get a real-world tryout this year in Papua New Guinea;
Alexander Anderson, 19, of North Bend describes the low-cost,
lightweight airborne wind turbine that he built and tested. The technology will
get a real-world tryout this year in Papua New Guinea.
• Designed a rainwater-collection system that brings clean drinking
water to 5,000 people in a rural village, also in Papua New Guinea;
• Started designing a solar microgrid system that could provide
electricity and jobs to villages in the developing world;
• Published and presented a mathematical formula that allows engineers
to determine how much more energy they could generate using an alternative
turbine design that concentrates the wind’s power;
• Applied for two patents, then scrapped that idea in favor of making
his work available to anyone, so others might benefit from his ideas.
Engineers and educators who know him say there’s no doubt that Anderson
is brilliant, perhaps a genius.
And he’s also a very nice guy.
“He wants to serve — he wants to be helpful to people,” said Larry
Hull, a Centralia orthopedist who has traveled extensively to developing
countries on health-care missions.
As a capstone project in college, Anderson worked with Hull to design
the rainwater-collection system that involved “jillions of calculations,” said
Hull, who received the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons’ humanitarian
award in 2010.
Anderson, who has a gentle demeanor and who looks even younger than 19,
is matter-of-fact about his skills.
“I’ve always been at the top of my class,” he said.
Over the past year, he finished an online master’s degree in electrical
power engineering from Washington State University. He was able to accomplish
that from his family’s home in North Bend — a neat-as-a-pin, cozy cabin on the
banks of the Snoqualmie River, its shelves lined with volumes of calculus,
physics, Latin, Greek and French.
A large reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man hangs on one
wall, and a wood stove crackles in the kitchen, where the family’s 20-year-old
tabby cat winds her way around the table.
Associate degrees
Olga, who has master’s degrees in education and linguistics, has
schooled him in Greek, Latin, French and Hebrew.
His father, an aircraft inspector at Boeing, has given his son a mechanical
background. “He has been teaching me how to fix things as long as I can
remember,” Alexander said.
After all three earned associate degrees in aeronautical and mechanical
pre-engineering at Green River, Alexander enrolled in Saint Martin’s, his parents’
alma mater, in Lacey.
While at Saint Martin’s, Anderson was introduced to Hull, who works
with Rotary International to bring health care to Madan, in Papua New Guinea.
Anderson needed a capstone project to finish his mechanical-engineering
degree. And clean-water collection was a critical need for the village. “That’s
why we really needed his help,” Hull said.
Anderson, along with his parents, designed a system to collect
rainwater from rooftops, store it in tanks, and pipe it to three community
centers and a medical clinic. It will help prevent the spread of disease, in a
country where only 32 percent of the rural population has access to safe
drinking water. The system is being built by the villagers.
For Anderson, it was magical. By using mathematical calculations, he
designed a system that could help prevent deadly diseases in a village on the
other side of the world.
“After I finished the water project, I said, what else can we do?”
Needed resource
Well, there’s electricity, Hull told him — a needed resource in Third
World countries. And so Anderson has been working on both solar- and
wind-energy systems.
He’s been exploring how using a flared, tube-shaped device called an
augmenter can concentrate wind power, making turbines more efficient.
Augmenters are sometimes used on wind farms, but engineers have had no
way to predict whether adding one justified the extra expense and weight at a
given location.
The Andersons designed models using 3-D printers, and tested the
devices in a low-speed wind tunnel they constructed in the garage. Eventually,
Anderson developed a formula that could predict an augmenter’s efficiency.
In 2014, he won a grant from the American Public Power Association
(APPA), a service organization run by publicly owned electric utilities, to
build his own airborne wind turbine — held aloft by balloons and tethered to
the ground.
Airborne turbines can be raised or lowered depending on wind speed, and
they can be used in areas where constructing a tower isn’t practical. Building
the turbine also gave Anderson a chance to test his augmenter formula, and last
year he flew the design at Puget Sound Energy’s Wild Horse Wind Facility.
The engineers at the power association were impressed.
“Think of the Third World opportunities,” marveled Michael Hyland,
senior vice president of engineering and operations for the association. The
balloon could be shipped in a box, set up and deployed quickly in a remote
area, for a low cost — providing enough power to run lights and charge
cellphones. Indeed, Hull will do just that in 2016, bringing it with him to
Papua New Guinea.
Hyland called it a smart, creative design with lots of potential. And
Anderson’s report to the American Public Power Association was equally
impressive.
“His final report to us was 60 pages,” Hyland said. “Think about that.
I don’t know where the kid has the spare time.”
Anderson said the airborne turbine went from a concept drawing to a
full-scale test in just five months. When it came to the paper, he just
couldn’t stop writing. “There was a lot to talk about,” he said, grinning.
Last year, Anderson presented his work at an Everett conference of the
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Family’s company
In 2014, Anderson applied for WSU’s new online master’s program,
designed for electrical power professionals who needed both technical and
managerial skills. The Andersons by this time had started a company, Odin
Energy Works, and the professional degree seemed like a good fit.
When he first applied, WSU engineering professor Bob Olsen was somewhat
mystified by this young student with a 4.0 GPA who wanted a graduate degree. He
called up the dean at Saint Martin’s, who told him that Anderson was “genius
level — he was a very, very good student. Definitely — take him.”
His work, Olsen said, was top-notch.
“He’s very interesting, very articulate, and what he’s going to be
doing — I really don’t know, but maybe the sky’s the limit,” he said.
In October, Anderson presented a paper on the rainwater-collection
system at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Global
Humanitarian Conference, winning first place.
He plans to work with the institute on the construction of “smart
villages” — bringing solar energy to third-world villages.
Robin Podmore, a Bellevue engineer who is closely involved with the
institute’s Smart Villages project, says he’s impressed by Anderson.
“I think this young man is going to change the world,” Podmore said.
