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.

Air purification

Summary

Our project is a system consists of 6 stages and a fan to purify the indoor air and to make it meet the standards of the indoor air quality. The stages of our project are 1.HEPA filter to remove dust and small particles2.Activated charcoal for removing odor3.Silica gel to reduce water vapor 4.PFE layer to remove Covid-19 if it was in the air5.Ionizer for removing viruses, VOC and bacteria6.LiOH to reduce CO2There are other features like shielded wires and rubber base.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We need fresh air while staying at home this long time. The indoor air have more contaminants than the outdoor air. Vans, air conditioners, and opening windows haven’t enough effect to breathe clearly. We are working on a system to monitor the indoor air quality. Our target is to purify the indoor air from carbon dioxide, water vapor, contaminants, bacteria, viruses, and even bad smells. We take Covid-19 in the consideration, too. Our system is provided with a layer to reduce the spread of the virus in the indoor air.

How We Developed This Project
  • According to the WHO about 4.2 millions of people dies every year because of air pollution, air pollution is really danger and it threads the human life all over the world, this inspires us to find a way to develop an indoor purifying system even though the great decay of the pollution percentage due to the pandemic it affects too the public health as the virus remain in air for up to three hours , so we need a device to purify the air and decrease the rapidly spread of the virus that’s motivates us to make it and with low costs so everyone can have it.
  •  First we searched about the challenge and its consequences. We found that the indoor air is polluted twice more than the outdoor air. We knew more about the standards of the indoor air quality and the contaminants of the air from the resources of NASA and ISS which we found on the challenge web page. Then we used the resources to know more about the systems that NASA and the ISS did to know what we can add or modify on them. After that we researched about the prior solutions of the indoor air pollution to know the pros and cons of these systems and to try to improve them. We found many systems and we developed a system which combines all of the pros of the systems and additional features. We also found solutions for many cons in these systems like they are affected by the electromagnetic waves from the electronic devices. We researched for solution to this problem and we found that the solution to this problem is to shield the wires. There was a noise due to the vibration caused by the fan on the surface so we thought about putting a rubber base for this system to reduce this noise. By this way we solved almost all the cons we found on the prior solution. We thought about putting a layer of the material which used in the masks (PFE) to avoid the spread of Covid-19 and putting a humidity controller to make sure of the quality of the air. There are also bad odors in the indoor air especially in the painting rooms or the kitchen so we thought that it will be better if we removed this odor by the activated charcoal. Finally we combined all the ideas that we thought about and all the pros and the fixed cons to come up with our solution.
  • We have read a research produced by NASA about how to remove humidity or water from the air by the silica gel that will be more efficient on earth, we also used data to know the types contaminants and their allowable concentrations.
  • HEPA filter 50$, Activated charcoal 17$, Silica gel 6$, PFE layer 1$, Ionizer 80$, Rubber base 7$, Fan 12$, Shielded wire 20$, Lithium hydroxide 5$. 
  • The problems that faced us while we are developing the air purification system are: some elements are expensive so we searched for alternatives cheap and  the purification systems have a little protection against tiny viruses so we worked hard to develop this point so it could protect from the spread of covid-19. The achievements are: we find a solution to prevent the bad odor by activated charcoal, we put ionizer to collect bacteria, viruses and VOC from the air, PFE layer like in the surgery mask to prevent tiny viruses like covid 19 virus flowing at air and we also developed the type of the cables to be shielded cables to reduce or prevent the electromagnetic interference with the other electronics.
Tags
#air purification, #indoor air quality standards, #HEPA filter, #silicon, #bacteria, #virus, #fan, #clear air, #reduce corona spread, #public health
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.