2024 - Daylight fireworks

—Use daylight to ease the conflict between traditional customs and environmental protection

In recent years, the Chinese government has banned fireworks in major Chinese cities due to the large amounts of air pollutants released by traditional fireworks displays. However, setting off fireworks on New Year’s Eve is a time-honored tradition in China with rich cultural connotations. For many Chinese, the glow of fireworks carries the joy and goodwill to welcome the New Year. Therefore, banning fireworks would diminish the core experience of the Chinese New Year. Fireworks are also part of the cultural tradition of Chinese society as a whole. The ban on fireworks may lead to the fading away of traditional customs and practices, which will have a negative impact on the cultural heritage. This design proposal hopes to adopt a new type of environmentally friendly fireworks to solve the contradiction between environmental protection and the continuation of traditional culture.

According to Chinese folklore, a monster called “夕” attacks villages on Chinese New Year’s Eve. People found that “夕” would be scared away by the fireworks, so it has been a tradition that families set off fireworks on this day, which is commemorated as “除夕” – which means eliminating monsters. This has become an important traditional custom in China, where every year on Chinese New Year’s Eve, families will set off fireworks in anticipation of a New Year free from disaster.

However, air pollution has become a growing problem in recent years, and fireworks have been banned in major Chinese cities due to the large amounts of air pollutants released by traditional fireworks displays.Therefore, we wanted to create daylight fireworks to solve this contradiction – to avoid environmental pollution, but also to continue the tradition of fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

We chose Cyathodium as the carrier of solar fireworks since it has irreplaceable roles:
1.As a spore plant in the early stage of natural primary succession, cyathodium adapts to almost any ecosystem.
2.The light saturation point of cyathodium is lower than average, so it can survive during insufficient sunlight, such as cloudy days or blocked by buildings.

Cyathodium takes advantage of the mutual supply of fluorescence and photosynthesis to form a virtuous cycle stimulated by daylight. The light source generated by the fluorescence reaction is used as the activator of photosynthesis. And the organic matter generated by photosynthesis provides ATP for the fluorescence reaction through cellular Respiration. Thus, the use of daylight fireworks is integrated into the ecosystem and has a positive impact on the natural environment.
Daylight fireworks can be divided into five main parts, namely the Launch, Container, Diffuser, Differential pull rod and Parachute.After getting the daylight fireworks device, people should leave the device under the sun for a while to absorb the daylight. When people are ready to release the daylight fireworks, they only need to put the container into a launching tube with a spring at the bottom. On the way up, the parachute stays compressed in the space at the top and as it rises to the top and begins to fall, air enters the device from the bottom up and bulges the compressed parachute. Through the deceleration action of the parachute, the pull rod drives the Diffuser and Container to produce relative displacement. At this point, the pusher spring in the Diffuser releases elastic potential energy, driving the posher plate to push the Cyathodium away, i.e. the firework explodes. After the explosion, Cyathodium falls to the city, positively impacting the ecosystem through a self-cycling process of fluorescence and photosynthesis. The containers that fall with the parachute can be refilled by consumers and reused.