The impact we are aiming is on people's health and we believe it’s going to be big! Taking Flu as example, it causes more then half a million victims per year and if we can purify the air where people are circling they may not get contaminated. Not considering the extreme scenario, purified air prevents lots of air diseases that impact directly in life quality. It’s a viable and valid solution in the technical perspective. It addresses the challenge of air purification. Our proposed solution has some innovation in the table also! There are masks with zinc and copper being used and it’s known ways to fabricate nanocellulose from different sustainable resources such as banana peel but, the nanocellulose working together with zinc and copper in air filters is not yet seen or escalated as it should be!
9 out of 10 people breath air significatively polluted, that could cause several diseases and syndromes, the pollution of the air could be understanded as a direct or indirect interference of men in the atmosphere, generating the emission of substances in large scale that could put in danger human health and affect the normality of our everyday life. On top of that we are facing a pandemic that is very contagious through the air, that is a huge problem that could be addressed with the solution we propose.
We started addressing TOP 10 ideas related to the #8 challenge that we feel we could work around. After that, we filtered the ideas in three main ones where it had the biggest impact, how does the solution address the problem and how could we use the provided data. From that we started studying air filtration data provided and forms to apply Nasa tech in our context of air cleaning. After that we defined our main goal as air filtration and not considering any detection, because filtering air have bigger implications and applications than the Coronavirus.
Regarding the solution, the nanocellulose we are targeting to use is not straightforward to get. There are lots of ways, some with more heavy chemicals and others with more natural compounds like enzymes but what is the best way? We still have to find the safer way for the prototype and for large scale production. Also, that nanocellulose can be caught from different materials such as bagasse, bamboo and coconut shell so we need to address these extraction precisely as necessary in the different places where we can be produced. It’s raw material being sustainable, another challenge we’d like to address it and make the change of these filters in a circular economy shape of replacement.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20060005220.pdf
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/engineering/life_support_systems/air_and_water_systems_testing/air/index.html
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2013/cg_4.html
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/advasc.html
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-02-08/Is-it-still-safe-to-travel-by-air-during-the-virus-outbreak--NVeOweJWJW/index.html