INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — For 23 years, the Indiana Soybean Alliance (ISA) and Purdue University have partnered to bring new uses for all the bean’s parts to market, by sparking young inventors through the ISA’s annual Student Soybean Product Innovation Competition.

 

In three of the years since 1995, there was no contest, which makes last week’s the actual 20th set of awards handed out – and splitting the $20,000 grand prize were four engineering students calling their product FiltraSoy. This team was also honored with the People’s Choice Award of $500, which is voted on by those attending the awards reception and looking over all the inventions.

 

What Samaneh Saadat, Andrew Huang, Anderson Smith and Sushant Mehan developed is an HVAC (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning) filter they say has the potential to be 15 percent more effective than high-efficiency filters already on the market. They tout its environmental benefits at the same time – since true to the contest – its materials are about 91 percent soy-based.

 

“When trying to come up with a product in the beginning,” said Smith, “we focused on three intersecting trends: socioeconomic, political and environmental.”

 

He said producing this filter costs about one-fifth of existing comparable products, based on their research. Mehan added, “Rich protein components in soy have potential to capture the gases, dust and microorganisms. Soy-based product helped in making paper with pore structure that can easily hold the dust particles.”

 

The filter is also treated with cold plasma, which sterilizes the paper’s surface and could reduce allergens and other pollutants in the air.

 

The students, who may seek funding through Purdue’s Ag-celerator later, thanked the ISA, farmer members and their Purdue advisors, Richard Stroshine and Joe Sinfield. Smith, of Fort Wayne, and Huang, from Maryland, are seniors at Purdue in environmental and natural resources engineering, while Mehan, from India, and Saadat, of Iran, are both agricultural and biological engineering PhD students.

 

Winning $10,000 from the ISA and proving that while every invention is serious, there is room for marketing humor, was the second-place invention from Kian-Ting Lee of Taiwan and Yudi Wen of China, both juniors studying food science. Soy Poo-Fession is not new in concept, but it still seems a novel product in the U.S. market.

 

The spray is designed to conquer the awkward problem of bathroom smell before rather than after “doing one’s business” – instead of an aerosol freshener to spray around the room after, just spritz a little Soy Poo-Fession into the toilet first.

 

Wen said the spray – which uses soy oil and other parts of the bean, and also lacks the potentially skin-irritating alcohol in similar products – forms a barrier that traps and neutralizes odor beneath water level. “It’s not like the air freshener that works after the smell gets out,” she explained – something her co-inventor, Lee, noted in the idea stage of the contest when they were first coming up with possible products – laughing as he talked of his embarrassing incident that prompted the idea.

 

Taking home $5,000 in third place were food science seniors Peili Wang and Wen-Wen Zhou from China, with Soy Droplet. It’s a small, melting candy-like snack high in protein and low in calories and carbohydrates. Like many Soy Innovation inventions, this is a proposed replacement for something already on the market – in this case, Zhou explained the analogous product is a dairy-based snack aimed primarily at children. Soy Droplet would be a great snack for any age group, she said, particularly people who are lactose-intolerant since it is soy- and not milk-based.

 

The materials manufacturing cost is extremely low, said Wang, providing opportunity for a good profit margin. The list of ingredients is small and simple to understand, including soy flour and protein, starch, sugar, water and vanilla extract (or any desired flavoring) among them. 

 

The women explained soybeans are a popular food base in China, but they noticed a limited choice of soy-based snacks in the United States. This helped them come up with the idea for the freeze-dried Soy Droplet. New ISA Chair Tom Griffiths, a farmer from Kendallville, told the students and their families that in his eight years on the board this competition has always been one of his favorite things about the job, its efforts “ultimately bringing back profitability to the farmer, like me and others up here” attending the ceremony. In addition to products, he said being in the contest may have helped some students decide to go into ag careers.

 

“I have great faith in our future because of you guys,” ISA CEO Jane Ade Stevens told the competitors later. She noted how the contest keeps growing over time, saying, “If you keep doing this, we’re going to have to find a new venue” for the ceremony, with more room than the already-spacious Indiana Rooftop Ballroom in downtown Indianapolis.

 

This year, 16 teams consisting of 50 students finished the competition. They are in a variety of majors and each team works with two faculty advisors who provide technical and market research support. Other teams (with regional students noted by city) were:

 

•OilSlick, an industrial lubricant developed by Haleigh Boss, Harshi Kapoor, Jessica Moster (of Clarkston, Mich.) and Viktoryia Stolyar (Carmel, Ind.)

•Absoybeancy, an absorbent meat-package pad from Abigail Murphy and Terryn Sears (both of Fort Wayne, Ind.) and Sean Magill (Park Ridge, Ill.)

•SoySorbent, an odor absorber from Susan Hubbard (West Lafayette, Ind.), Elizabeth Tedder (Hope) and Kiersten Troyer (Bristol)

•Soy Chalk from Austin Lowell, Yihan Xie and Yijie Zhao

•PolySoymer, an elastomeric polymer material from Andrew Cameron, Sarah Hansen (Homer Glen, Ill.), Andrew Orosz and Jacob Ryan (both of Crown Point, Ind.)

•LifePure, industrial water purification developed by Ziming Wang, Jinxia Yao and Haote Zhang

•Soy Hairmate, a shampoo ball from Xuan Luo, Tara Marlow (Trafalgar, Ind.) and Ziting Yang

•Soy Soycology, facial and baby wipes from Terence Babb (Lafayette, Ind.), Nurul Adlina Binti Mohd Fauzi and Zhesheng Huang

•SoyMein, ramen-type noodles from Marwa El Hindawy, Jeremy Garst (Thorntown, Ind.) and Jillian Sunnygard (Northfield, Ill.)

•SoyBin, a compostable container from Samantha Tinney (Fort Wayne) and Leeza Kuo

•S-Cups, a K-Cup coffee filter from Alexis Laureano (Warsaw, Ind.), Cody Spoolstra (Portage) and Kimberly Wylin (Indianapolis)

•NeoSeed, a planting seeder from Trang Dieu, Harshil Renawala, Surej Sathanianarayanan and Nivedita Shetty

•Soya Soft, a skin wash and degreaser developed by Jifu Wen, Can Zhao, Samantha Dunn and Theresa Emeli (both from Indianapolis)