Pure-Tex| 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.

Purify the air supply

Summary

Air is an important element for life, whether it is in earth or space. For space it is always a challenge to maintain air quality for astronauts but when it comes to earth, challenges are more wider due to flow and availability of hazardous elements such as carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide etc. In this project we concerned more on life supports system to achieve indoor air quality standards ensuring, supply of oxygen, removing carbon dioxide and filtering hazardous elements.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Maintaining indoor air quality doesn't only mean adding more oxygen rather filtering volatile particles effectively and efficiently. For NASA, they have made a conjugated system for ISS where they focused just not only on life support system but also air revitalisation techniques. Which means supplying oxygen and regeneration oxygen simultaneously. But in our project, we mainly focused on how air quality can be ensured, providing pure oxygen and removing life threatened virus.

The key ideas are,

  • How to make an efficient and cost effective conjugated process to maintain and control the air purification technique.
  • Aligning the technique in a manner to ensure protection against virus and serious health issue happening nowadays.

 These key points will cover all the objectives of the challenge.

How We Developed This Project
  1. We are going through a tough time indeed. Nature teaching us how we should behave and react. This is just not COVID-19 rather rapid industrialisation and use of fossil fuel have made the air quality maintenance more challenging. The inspiration came to make a change, where we can breath safely and independently.
  2. Maintaining air quality depends on various variables, those leads to different approach. For NASA, their threats and challenges are different than maintaining air quality on earth. In this project our approach was to make sure
    *The purification ensuring good air quality index (0-50)
    *Supplying pure and dust free oxygen
    *Filtering virus and other harmful elements
    *The process is cost effective and efficient
  3.  While working we tried to figure out, how NASA is maintaining air quality in ISS. which leads a way to map the solution. We figured out the challenges and opportunity comparing with ISS solutions on earth. Besides that Space agency's data helped us to go through so many techniques used in air filtration.
  4. The redesigned system includes electrostatic microfiber filtration, water-based air revitalisation, algae bioreactor and at the end four-layer air purification system to remove the virus and harmful elements entirely. We will use series of detector to analyse air quality.
  5. The project was definitely challenging as our objective was just not only providing oxygen rather making it safe from virus and other volatile elements.

*Problems

  • To make a cycled system for air purification
  • To change existing process and aligning with projects objective

* Achievements

  • Analysis of all possible solution used by NASA for ISS
  • We combined threats and opportunities to make the purification more sustainable
Project Demo


Working Process link:

Process Flow-Image Link


Here is the VIDEO link:

Process VIdeo Link

Data & Resources
  1. Biologial air   filter for International Space Station http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2015/08/Biologial_air_filter_for_International_Space_Station
  2. What was done on ISS https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/advasc.html   
  3. Closing the Loop: Recycling   Water and Air in Space https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/146558main_RecyclingEDA(final)%204_10_06.pdfhttps://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/9-12/features/F_Recycling_on_the_ISS.htmlhttps://chat.spaceappschallenge.org/channel/purify-air-supply
  4. Environmental Control and Life Support   System (ECLSS) https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/167129main_Systems.pdf
  5. REGENERATIVE LIFE SUPPORT https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/teacher/course/LifeSupport.html
  6. life support https://www.nasa.gov/content/life-support-systems
  7. Compact and Lightweight Sabatier Reactor   for Carbon Dioxide Reduction https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120016419.pdf
  8. Development of Carbon Dioxide Removal   Systems for NASA’s Deep Space Human Exploration Missions 2017-2018 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20180006342.pdf
  9. Air Quality forcast https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/forecast
  10. Algae 'Bioreactor' on Space Station Could   Make Oxygen, Food for Astronauts https://www.space.com/space-station-algae-experiment-fresh-air.html
  11. Building Better Life Support Systems for Future Space Travel https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/photobioreactor-better-life-support/
  12. NASA Develops Algae Bioreactor as a   Sustainable Energy Source https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2009/09-147AR.html
  13. Clearing   the Air in Space https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/long_duration_sorbent_testbed   Long Duration Sorbent Testbed https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=1881
  14. Breathing Easy on the Space Station https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2000/ast13nov_1
  15. Sustaining Humans Beyond Earth https://www.nasa.gov/content/life-support-systems
  16. Air Purification ISS  https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/advasc.html
  17. Air quality  https://earthdata.nasa.gov/earth-observation-data/near-real-time/hazards-and-disasters/air-quality
  18. health data  https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/pathfinders/health-and-air-quality-data-pathfinder   Earth Data  https://earthdata.nasa.gov/earth-observation-data/near-real-time/hazards-and-disasters/ash-plumes   Nava  https://www.naava.io/en/
  19. Ammonia removers plants  https://www.homedetoxing.com/air-purifying-plants-remove-ammonia/
  20. Ammonia removal in ISS https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20180004945.pdf
  21. NASA Clean Air Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study
Tags
#air quality, #Algae Bioreactor, #Bio Scrubbing, #ISS
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.