Hope Creators - Space Apps Challenge

Hope Creators | 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.

Pure air provider

Summary

Pure air provider is an air purifying technology combined from 3 different filtration systems each one work on filtering a specified type of pollutants from air to provide clean safe air.The air passes through three levels of filtration:1)A microfilter to purify the air from pollutants like dust.2)A UV-C light lamp to kill microorganisms like viruses and fungi. 3)An activated carbon substrate to purify the air from chemicals and smoke the UV can’t kill.then, the air is finally purified

How We Addressed This Challenge

This challenge is to use the ISS as inspiration and develop a system to monitor and purify the indoor air and it’s just a very important challenge in this time as a result of staying at home and its importance to protect yourself and your family from the great pandemic (COVID-19), so we begin to thought how to develop a system that everyone can make use of it, a system that emits the least amount of dangerous gases and can also last for a lot of time.

so, we begin to take our inspiration from the International Space Station (ISS)and we reach a system that can purify the air with a high quality this system consists of 4 parts which are (air suction- microfilter-UV lamp- activated carbon filtration) these systems work in a complementary way to recover the weak points of each other so we get a pure air free of dust, smoke, odors, chemicals, and the UV lamp can kill the DNA of any virus

the system can be used in many places and this is how it described the challenge and enable you to stay safe at your home while you can breathe fresh air safely.

How We Developed This Project

Once the challenges have been declared, one of them attracted our attention–Purify the air supply- as its importance appeared especially after COVID-19. One of the main requirements for life is clean air without different types of pollutants. It will reduce the possibility of being ill. So, it was our first choice to develop a project in this field. First, the space agencies’ resources were inspirational for us as we read about the air purifying system in ISS and the airocides developed by NASA. Then, we started searching about different air purifying systems used on Earth that led us to some kinds such as: UV lamp, activated carbon filtration, thermodynamic sterilization…etc. After some research, some cons were found in each type. Because of that, we attempted to make some links between them trying to get a relatively complete air purifying system. It was achieved by collecting the types that complement each other. After some attempts, we have collected: UV lamp, activated carbon filtration and microfilters-used in ECLSS. The UV is excellent with bacteria and viruses but not efficient with chemicals and smoke from cigarettes. On the other hand, activated carbon is highly efficient with chemicals and smoke but not viruses and bacteria. The microfilters are practical with dust and some microscopic particles. It was quite difficult to achieve this complementary system as each type has some disadvantages. We also tried to get the most benefit from space agencies’ resources and it was mainly achieved by using the microfilter inspired by ECLSS.