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Monday, November 2, 2020

Malaysian earns honourable mention in NASA challenge

 

Engineer Kelvin Lim Chin Seong received a certificate from NASA for his invention in their Lunar Loo Challenge recently. (Kevin Lim pic)

PETALING JAYA: Malaysia might be a small country but there is no shortage of extraordinary talent among its people, one of whom just made the country proud.

Engineer Kevin Lim Chin Seong, 38, recently earned an honourable mention from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), for his invention in their Lunar Loo Challenge.

NASA launched the challenge in June this year to crowdsource innovative concepts for space toilets. The new designs could help future explorers have a place to answer nature’s call when on missions to the moon.

There were more than 2,000 submissions including Lim’s that was called the Fully Self-Contained Lunar Toilet.

“I’ve had a passion for engineering since I was a young boy. If you were to ask my parents, they would have loads of stories to tell on how I used to dismantle household appliances.”

“Mind you, these were rather expensive appliances. You name it, the VCR player, record player, vacuum cleaner, weighing machines, bicycles and even fans,” Lim tells FMT.

As a six-year-old with a curious mind and a screwdriver in hand, Lim would lose himself in the job of painstakingly tearing apart these appliances, eager to see how the internal mechanisms worked, then experiment on how he could improve its functionality.

He recalls that whenever his father needed to track down lost screwdrivers and pliers from his toolbox, the first person he would ask was his son.

“I owe my parents a debt of gratitude. They supported my hobby and constant curiosity,” says Lim.

That same childlike curiosity was nurtured well into his university days and later when he launched his career as an engineer. At the same time, he developed a passion for space exploration.

In 2002, Lim found himself as a finalist of a design competition. He later realised that although he did not emerge a winner, he had thoroughly enjoyed the entire process of conceptualising the design to crafting it for submission. He said he also learned many new things along the way.

“I came across NASA’s Lunar Loo Challenge on Facebook when they were looking for submissions,” Lim says, adding that participating in the challenge was his way of sharing his experiences as an engineer and for putting Malaysia on the map.

Having worked as a directional engineer on oil-drilling rigs, both offshore and on land, Lim tells FMT that toilets weren’t always available to him and his crew.

“If we were working in the city then yes, the toilet was always available to us.

“Even when we worked offshore, it was generally pretty good but the problem arose when we worked in the middle of a jungle or even in a desert and we needed to answer the call of nature,” Lim said, explaining that this lack of a basic necessity that most took for granted, made him wonder what astronauts in space must go through.

Kevin’s certificate of honourable mention from NASA. (Kevin pic)

According to Lim, the Lunar Loo Challenge was stiff due to the high volume of entries, resulting in NASA having to postpone the announcement of winners by three weeks so the judges had sufficient time to evaluate all entries.

Lim says the inspiration for his invention came from his favourite sci-fi film actor, Matt Damon, whose character in The Martian was forced to solve one predicament after another in order to head back to Earth safely.

“When I first read the challenge, I pretty much had a rough idea. It then took me about two months from writing down the ideas to figuring out how the ideas would work seamlessly with one another,” he says.

Lim explains the invention went through various stages of calculations before the design was formalised using Computer-Aided Design to prove it would work and that all the specifications were met.

“The simplicity of the design was an important factor so that the astronauts could use the space toilet with relative ease.”

Lim said he was extremely grateful and happy to receive the certificate from NASA as it has inspired him to continue advancing his career in research and development.

“There are many technical challenges be it for space exploration, global warming and renewable energy, and I would like to play my part to move mankind forward.” - FMT

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