Purify the Air Supply

Has your time spent indoors increased during the COVID-19 pandemic as a result of stay-at-home and shelter-in-place policies worldwide? Your challenge is to use the International Space Station (ISS) as inspiration and develop a system to monitor and/or purify indoor air. It is entirely up to you whether the system you design is able to be used on Earth (for example in homes, businesses, transportation, etc.) and/or in space.

Rocket Purifier

Summary

We developed a system capable of monitoring a person's sleep, with the goal of ensuring an adequate respiration, utilizing electrolysis in a water solution with NaCl, to produce O2. Then a report is generated based on the images captured by a camera and gases sensors with tips, so that the user can better plan to have a more profitable night and even detect problems related to sleep, such as insomnia.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Consulting the information released from Nasa to this challenge, we observed a big consideration by the institution about the quality of the air inside the international space station, during respiration humans liberate carbon dioxide and in others metabolic processes, it extricate gases such as methane. This justifies the utilization of equipment as Potok, implemented in ISS in 2001, eliminating pathogens microorganisms by electroporation. According to IPEA (national Brazilian governmental organ about data and statistics), about 64% of the Brazilian population utilizes closed public spaces and of large crowding. Therefore they present an low air quality, since it circulates only inside of the same ambient, promoting the spread of solid particles liberated from people (including virus and bacteria), besides that the gases liberated from humans such as carbon dioxide and others abovementioned. This way it becomes evident that any project that seeks to improve the air ventilation and renewal in these environments, would be valorous not only to the current moment, but for all the situations of human crowding, presenting results in long term improvement in the life quality of the people inserted on those places.

How We Developed This Project

In the principle, we had many ideas related to the prevention of the propagation of COVID-19 by the air, which initiates with ideas referring to masks with sterilizer proprieties, utilization of an electric field for electroporation of the bacteria membrane and even the use of biological controls, such as bacteria that make chemo and photosynthesis. In the end, we had an understanding to focus in the air purification, so we developed a project based in the maintenance of the oxygen in the ISS. In general, it treats about a process of evaluation of the air quality followed by an AI analysis to remove the possible disorders during sleep, the sensors will indicate the quantity of oxygen that will be needed to be released from the breaking of the H20 molecule and also will notify the user about it through advices.

Project Demo

https://youtu.be/JNQEWtLJmjo

Data & Resources
  • IPEA. Mobilidade urbana no Brasil.  <https://www.ipea.gov.br/portal/index.php?option=com_alphacontent&ordering=3&limitstart=5140&limit=20> Acess in 05/30/20.
  • Garcia, M. International space station / NASA.  <https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html> Acess in 05/30/20
  • World health organization. Worldwide Project on Sleep and Health : project overview <https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/64100> acess in 05/30/20
Tags
#Air quality, #RocketApollo19, #DreamAboutAir, #AirIsLife, #No-Covid19
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.