Reducing Risk for the Vulnerable - Space Apps Challenge

Reducing Risk for the Vulnerable| 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.

Cost-effective air filtration for high-density / low income areas

Summary

For this project we designed and assembled prototypes of air filtration systems that purify a home's air to US hospital standards using off-the-shelf products and no construction skills. Either prototype requires an initial investment of under $30 and an ongoing cost of $.015 per day, and will clean a 2800 to 4000 square foot home.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We provide practical low-cost examples of air filtration systems that will clean a home's air .

How We Developed This Project

We heard that people with the highest risk of contracting COVID lived in high-density areas, had low incomes, or both. We wanted to provide practical examples of air filtration systems that would reduce the risk of aerosol transmission at low cost.

We used the ISS air filtration system as a base and adapted their process using various COVID 19 mask designs. We consulted with an MD to verify that our approach had merit from a medical perspective. We tested the various prototypes to ensure that they performed as intended. We calculated airflows to ensure that our prototypes' capacity met US hospital standards, (which are tighter than CDC recommendations).

Project Demo

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2768787626678301&id=100006412717049?sfnsn=mo

Project Code

This project required no programming.

Data & Resources