Henry Grover
8th Grade, Riverside STEM Academy
Riverside, CA
Sprayable Hydrogels for Preventing the Rekindling of Wildfires
The 2025 Palisades fire in California started because a previous fire re-ignited. Henry and his twin brother Jack studied whether a hydrogel could be put on burned areas to stop them from re-lighting. Their final gel hydrated in 15 minutes and could stop charcoal briquettes from relighting for 27 minutes.
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Project Background
The 2025 Palisades fire in California was actually started by another fire, the Lachman fire, which was still smoldering and re-lit six days later. Henry and his twin brother Jack knew that firefighters struggled to put enough water on burned areas to keep them from re-igniting. “We knew that hydrogel was capable of absorbing hundreds of times its weight in water and releasing it over a short period of time, so we wanted to use it to prevent rekindling,” Henry says.
Tactics and Results
Henry and Jack soaked nine hydrogels in water, weighed them, and dried them in an oven, measuring them every 15 minutes. They then tested how well hydrogels stuck to surfaces, spreading them on leaves, hanging the leaves vertically and measuring how much hydrogel weight the leaf lost. This allowed them to narrow down their options to two hydrogels, and they measured which hydrated faster, soaking both in water and weighing them for up to three hours. Their top choice was sodium polyacrylate, which hydrated in 15 minutes. The twins applied their gel to hot charcoal briquettes and measured how long they took to reignite, and showed that charcoal sprayed with water re-lit in only three minutes, while their hydrogel took 27 minutes. Finally, they designed a sprayer, which could spray their gel 18.3 meters.
Beyond the Project
Henry has worked to restore a robot from the 1980s, updating it to make it compatible with modern technology. “The change was nothing short of magical. From a robot covered in yellowed plastic, it turned into a fully functioning robot capable of pouring drinks and serving muffins,” he says. He also likes collecting old cameras and understanding how they work. Henry also enjoys 3D animation. “I wrote a screenplay that I am now animating with characters modeled and rigged all by myself,” he says. He’d like to work at an animation studio.
