Scinexus Space Apps 2020 Covid-19 Team| 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.

VIRONA air

Summary

We started a research about how we can decrease the effects of corona on humans. After our research, we found out that UVC has an impact on corona. But UVC is harmful for human health so we decided to use Far-UVC light and we developed a device. Our device is mostly effective in quarantine places baby rooms hospitals and care homes. We can control our device with our phones by downloading an application. Our device can purify 26 cubic meters of air in an hour. Our device is portable.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We aimed to addresse this challenge's aim by purifying abundant amount of air in a short period of time.

How We Developed This Project

We thought one of the best solutions to prevent coronavirus spread, is to purify the air. We are inspired by ISS air purifying sysytems in the filter of our device. We used Raspberry Pie and Google Colab Research for coding. Since it is a virus, we are aware that we cannot acually "kill" it, so we used the advantage of the fact that COVID-19 is a RNA based virus and decided to inactivate its reproduction activities. To do so, we have chosen to use Far-UVC light leds in 222nm, which has no side effects on human but stil fatal to virus and bacteria. We applied a filter system on the device. The air will enter the device from the bottom and the filter on the top will release the purified and virus-free air. The device will be made of steel, to minimize the UVC exposure. During our research, we had a lot of complications. We couldn't use UVB because it causes skin cancer and eye irritation and we couldn't use plastic in the device where the air flows, because it turned  out that plastic is not resistant to Far-UVC light. However, as we continued to research and develop our ideas, we determined that as we shorten the distance between the led and the target (virus or bacteria) , the effect of the light increases. As a result of our calculation, now, we are able to inactivate the virus and bacteria in 3.2 minutes.

Project Demo

Our power point presentation is here.

Tags
#airquality #airpurify
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.