Air Disinfection vs COVID-19

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Medical

The current main method for prevention of the Coronavirus is disinfecting the public surfaces that have high chance of interaction with people as much as possible. This is because the main route of transmission of Coronavirus from one person to another is through droplets which are sneezed or coughed out by infected people. A single cough can produce up to 3,000 droplets, while a sneeze can produce as many as 10,000. These droplets then fall on a surface that is touched by uninfected person, who then touches their face and in to mouth, eye or noise. According to the latest MIT report, the Coronavirus can travel 27 feet in the air horizontally and vertically and stay in the air for hours. The virus travels in much tinier droplets in form of “aerosol" (virus remains suspended in the air in very tiny water droplets). Since these droplets have very low in weight they can enter into ventilation system in hospital room like seen in China. This is very critical problem because we can clean, disinfect surfaces but how can we manage to disinfect the air?

This project is about building a mechanism that can disinfect air from the coronavirus by increasing its weight when it is in the air to make it fall on the ground so that we disinfect the surface regularly. The weight increasing mechanism of the coronavirus while it is in the air can be achieved by installing water steam generator with in X distance and increase the local environment humidity especially in densely populated cities. Increasing the air humidity or air moisture content will increase the weight if the aerosol containing the coronavirus because the generated steam droplets will attach themselves to the aerosol because of their basic water nature. This increment of weight will force the droplets carrying the coronavirus fall in to the ground or surfaces without going longer distance. Then we regularly disinfect surfaces killing the air droplets fall on to the surfaces. For cities like New York, this is perfect because considering their population density and their electric power availability. The water steam generator have simple working mechanism which is it vaporize water by generating enough heat using electric power. Since this problem has been seen in first hand in China, installing this will save many lives.

Currently there is an urgent in revising the guidelines being given by the WHO and the CDC on the needs for protective equipments particularly for the frontline health workers. This is because there have been very tangible data that shows the coronavirus is airborne. This project will avoid this risk by solving the problem entirely and for more information please visit https://solve.mit.edu/challenges/health-security-pandemics/solutions/21295

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  • ABOUT THE ENTRANT

  • Name:
    Anteneh Gashaw
  • Type of entry:
    individual
  • Patent status:
    none