We have designed a new air filtration system using the principle of PCO to sterilise the air flowing around the school and prevent it from stagnating.
One of the biggest challenges we face globally is the safe return of children back to school. The closure of schools has made a big impact on everyone's lives. Under current health and safety measures in many countries around the world it is seen as unsafe and impossible to allow children to return to school with the resources available to date.
Young children especially have found it difficult to maintain social distancing and struggle to wear a mask to prevent contracting COVID-19. We came up with a solution to this. Our product, if installed in classrooms, would allow students to return to school safely, ensuring the air is almost entirely free of any airborne viruses, including COVID-19.
By allowing these children to return to school, students can receive their education from a teacher in real life rather than relying on online learning that is difficult for many children. Returning children back to school as soon as possible would mean parents can then return to work and the economy can start up again. We strive to achieve this is a safe and efficient way.
As school children ourselves, we wanted to address an issue which influences our daily lives. A lot of people are stressed that schools will not be safe to return to, and will contribute to the spread of the virus. We were inspired to create a system which purifies the air in schools, that could also be adapted in other settings, as we will all be returning to school when lock down ends. At full capacity, it is impossible to socially distance within a school environment; yet, we cannot stay away from school until COVID-19 is no longer a threat. We cannot afford to miss two years of education whilst a vaccine is developed. So we must find another way to reduce the spread of the virus between children, and adults, who cannot distance themselves.
We started this challenge by looking at how air is cleaned onboard the ISS and how this technology could be applicable for use in multiple, semi-large rooms. We discovered that technology developed by NASA was already adapted to purify air in rooms by a company called "Airocide". However, whilst researching the main commercial air filters, we discovered that the majority were designed for either single small rooms or single large rooms. It was difficult to find a system designed to filter air from multiple small rooms at the same time. Thus, we went to work on adjusting these systems for our custom needs. It was also important to lower the hefty prices of these machines to make it more practical, and feasible, for installation in schools. Whilst conducting research for this project, we noticed the sheer lack of open data related to indoor air pollution and thus, we came to the following conclusion: the introduction of air purifiers in schools, homes, and offices, throughout the globe, would provide the perfect opportunity to gather regional data about the standards of indoor air quality.
A very logical property that our system must have is that it should not contribute to the infection of people. This almost became a problem as we considered using one big intake valve. This would, however, allow for possibly contaminated air to flow past healthy people on its way to the intake. We overcame this problem by placing multiple intake ducts above each student, throughout the classroom.
To make use of space agency data, we utilised multiple data sets from earthdata.nasa.gov in order to establish an understanding of how different atmospheric gases affect both outdoor, and indoor, air pollution throughout different regions of the globe. We also acknowledged that in combination with the indoor air quality data - monitored, and generated, by our air purifiers - the data sets provided by earthdata.nasa.gov could be used to train a predictive neural network that models, and predicts, the effects of outdoor pollution on indoor air quality.
The drawing program used is Autodesk AutoCAD 2015.
Our team faced the problem of all working in different time zones, making full team meetings infrequent and short. This required most of our communication to happen by text and messages were often misinterpreted leading to tangents off of our original project.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Nogz9ob7n4Kr8fgQvPVyt2kRwaj48xeocnSd54VS8CA/edit?usp=sharing
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