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.

Take a deep breath, with Breeze

Summary

The challenge is to purify the air of indoor environment, where we live most of our time. It is needed to guarantee that our homes, our transportation, our offices and where we have fun are free of health risks. The current pandemy brings the requirement and the learning to keep our air clean, avoiding that in the future the same issues are repeated. It is why we believe that our solution allows to mitigate the risks of future pandemic diseases with a safe, non-invasive and scalable technology.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our project uses different technologies, biological methods, specialized hardware and software in order to identify potential health threats in the air contained in an indoor environment, and according to what is found by many sensors acts accordingly, activating filters, ozone cameras or even ultraviolet light in order to decontaminate how many times and for how long is needed.

Our solution basically is a modular device which performs the air filtration generating O³ starting from part of the O² captured from the air, and inserting the correct amount and limit the maximum human exposure besides instantly disinfecting the inlet filter with UV rays.

The complete module also consists of reading the air inlet and outlet with sensors of the following types:

  • Air pollution sensor
  • Ammonia
  • Carbon Dioxide
  • Carbon Monoxide
  • Chlorine
  • Formaldehyde
  • Hydrogen
  • Hydrogen Sulfide
  • Methane
  • Nitrogen Dioxide
  • Ozone
  • Particles 2.5 microns and less
  • Particles 10 microns and less
  • Perclorethylene
  • Sulfur dioxide
  • VOC

After filtering, the air that will be reinserted in the closed space will be of a decontaminating nature, decontaminating the entire environment.

How We Developed This Project

This project was designed based on the difficulties identified to use the public transportation during epidemic times. The public transportation is one of the worst environments for contagious diseases dissemination, hence our solution is intended to turn these into clean and safe areas or even a decontamination environment for people to use.

Using a combination of existing technologies, such as filters, ozone, UV rays, sensors and broadband access, our solution is scalable for the global use and in different transportation, such as buses, trains, cars, airplanes and others.

Project Demo

https://youtu.be/GYf2QRtYz0g

Data & Resources

NASA Resources used

ISS Air Purification

Closing the Loop: Recycling Water and Air in Space

NASA Spinoffs: Home Air Purifiers Eradicate Harmful Pathogens

NASA Earth Air Quality data

Health and Air Quality data

Air Pollution / COVID-19 data

ESA Resources used

Biological air filter for International Space Station

Air Revitalization System

Tags
#airquality, #publictransportation, #UV, #ozone, #global economy, #breath
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.