Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

Tinkering with ideas
By Aaysha Cader
His CV will most likely identify him as a trainee at Commercial Bank, but this 22-year-old also has a more exciting profession: Asiri Dilhan de Silva is, in his free-time, an ‘Inventor’. Yes, like Thomas Edison and Co. Making improvisations to Edison’s rather out-of-date light bulb, Asiri has devised an Incandescent Lamp Protector, which according to him, has a 40% greater energy-saving capacity, and can increase the lifetime of a bulb from 1000 to 5000 hours!

That is not all. He is also the inventor of the Electronic Specific Heat Capacity Indicator, which he says is a lot more accurate than the ordinary method of measuring it using a lactometer. This invention won him third place at the International Inventions Competition 2001, held in Geneva, Switzerland. He was awarded in the Electronic, Electrical, Video and Telecommunications category at this contest, which saw competitors from 44 countries.

Winning awards is nothing new to him. He won the prestigious Asia Awards for Excellence in Youth Work in the science and technology category in 2002. At the awards ceremony held in Singapore, Asiri was the youngest awardee among competitors from all over Asia. The Youth Programme Asia Centre in India organized this contest. He has also been the winner of many national awards, including the Youth Centre’s Yauwana Sammana in 1999.

He was also one of six chosen as Outstanding Young Persons in Sri Lanka at TOYP 2002. Having had his A/L education at Ananda College, Asiri always had a penchant for meddling with what most people would gladly leave alone: electronics. “I used to make simple circuits when I was small,” he says, adding that his first invention, at age 11, was an automatic sieve, which won him an award at a school science exhibition. Many others followed, including a Lightning Indicator, Improved Soldering Iron as well as a Multi-purpose cassette, which incidentally, works without a tape.

Most of his inventions are practical ones that can be used in day-to-day activities. “They are also relatively cheap,” he says, adding that it would be impractical if his inventions cost a lot of money.

So what are the new projects? “A lifesaving swimming kit,” he says, elaborating on its features. Equipped with an automatic floating apparatus, he hopes to attach a phone with GPRS facilities, as well as a mechanism that will help those on land to map out the location of the swimmer. He has also just completed an Electronic Fish Keeper, which checks the pH value of tank water and sounds an automatic alarm at critical levels. It also auto-filters the water, and is equipped with a UV light that destroys harmful bacteria. Having secured patent rights for five of his inventions, Asiri hopes to market them in the near future.

Having done biological science subjects for A/Ls, his original plan was to study medicine. “But it was obviously the wrong course to take,” he says now. More into computers, Asiri is currently reading for a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology at the University of Colombo. He is also the author of two books: one on Java programming, and the other on Electronics and Transformer Rewinding.

They are the only two books on the subject to be written in Sinhalese. On electronics and transformer rewinding, he reveals that even English books on the subject were very scarce. ISBN-certified, his books are available at all leading bookstores in Colombo and suburbs. Outstanding in his own right, Asiri hopes to continue churning innovative ideas into practical applications.

Back to Mirror Magazine