COVID Hunters - Space Apps Challenge

COVID Hunters| Purify the Air Supply

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.

M-BAR - Microalgae Based Air Recycler

Summary

The project presents a totally innovative proposal, which aims to improve as existing air conditions, through the production of oxygen from the creation of microalgas. For that, we will use a system that captures atmosphere carbon dioxide, developing it in the form of breathable oxygen on a large scale. Through this solution we look at giving people a future in which the air is more breahable and cleaner in closed environments and with a large circulation of people, enabling, for a long term, an improvement of health and quality of life.

How We Addressed This Challenge

The challenge is how to improve indoor air quality, to be applied here on earth or on the space station.

The M-BAR is a device that transforms atmospheric CO2 into oxygen, which is the only gas that humans breathe. The increase in oxygen concentration and air renewal would already represent a significant improvement in indoor air, however the M-BAR does more than that, as its air recycling system has a stage in the water, we already have a filter of particles that is the water itself, in addition we have a biological filter, because a high concentration of algae in the water generates an eutrophication of the same which makes the environment toxic for most microscopic life forms.

In addition to these factors, we have come from this process, humidifying the air as a result of cooling the air in hot environments.

And if we take the space station, we have an air recycling system, highly efficient, low energy cost and that can work with proper maintenance as an infinite supply of high quality air.

How We Developed This Project

We had an inspiration based on a book we read a few years ago, “the despair of leviathan”, where there was a ship that used plants for the air recycling system, when we started a research, I saw that plants did not produce enough use, and in the middle of our research, we found that microalgae produced up to 1000 times more oxygen than plants per biomass, that was all we needed to boost the project.

We started doing a lot of research on how algae and soon we discovered the presence of photobioreactors that were used to create algae for the production of biomass, we identified that there was all the technology we needed, and that I just needed to study it in order to create a system that would produce air, and only use the known to do what was never done, was a very happy discovery.

When you analyze the photoreceptors that exist, you can see a clear picture of what it takes to grow algae and generate oxygen, so we define all the systems in a flowchart, and for each node in the flowchart, we dig into equipment we already knew.

So we started to ask ourselves where we would apply the system, initially the space station and deep mining wells came to mind, but soon we woke up to more widespread applications like shopping malls, hospitals and in minutes we glimpsed our equipment as an appliance. , it was at that moment that the M-BAR was born with its cylindrical shape and rotating propellers.

So we defined only two forms of production among all we imagined, the appliance and a small plant, and we got to work, we did some parametric drawings in FreeCad with all the components we thought about and then we exported it to blender, where we I gave texture and life to our dream, it was something extremely pleasurable for us. Then we started to animate and produce the project video.

We started to develop Python software to calculate all the variables of the project, but due to the short time we cannot finish the bibliographic research necessary to produce the code.