The coronavirus is stimulating all kinds of innovation and creativity from both the scientific community and the business community. The main goal now is to develop a vaccine and therapeutic drugs to fight the virus. Companies have shut down normal production of products and have gone on to manufacture essential medical equipment such as ventilators as well as personal protective equipment to meet the needs of hospitals and emergency services. This is all good.
Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Houston (UH) have developed an air filter that kills the coronavirus. It’s a catch-and-kill filter and it sounds really promising. It traps viruses and other pathogens and kills them instantly. The researchers teamed up with others to make this happen. Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Superconductivity Center at UH, and Monzer Hourani, CEO of Medistar, a Houston-based medical real estate development firm, as well as other researchers, teamed up to design the filter. With just one pass through the filter, 99.8% of germs were killed.
The researchers reported that virus testing at the Galveston National Laboratory found that 99.8% of the new SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was removed in a single pass through a filter made of foam of commercially available nickel heated to 200 degrees Celsius, or around 392 degrees Fahrenheit. It also killed 99.9% of the anthrax spores in tests at the National Laboratory, which is administered by the University of Texas Medical Branch.
Think about the possible uses of this filter. Schools, for example, could reopen more safely if classrooms had these filters. Other places that Ren, MD Anderson, a professor of physics at UH and a corresponding co-author of the article published in Materials Today Physics, suggest are airports, planes, and cruise ships. Medistar executives also suggest building a desktop model to purify the air in the immediate area of an office worker.
Medistar approached the Texas Superconductivity Center at the University of Houston in March for help developing the filter. We know that the virus is airborne and can potentially stay in the air for up to three hours. The filter can certainly act as a tool to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus in places where social distancing may not be very practical.
The researchers knew that the virus does not stay in the heat, nothing above 158 degrees Fahrenheit (70 degrees Celsius), so they decided to use a heated filter. They wanted to increase the filter temperature, at least 200 degrees Celsius to instantly kill germs. At first they used nickel foam, then adjustments had to be made.
But nickel foam has low resistivity, making it difficult to raise the temperature enough to quickly kill the virus. The researchers solved that problem by folding the foam, connecting multiple compartments with electrical wires to increase resistance enough to raise the temperature up to 250 degrees C.
By making the filter electrically heated, rather than heating it from an external source, the researchers said they minimized the amount of heat escaping from the filter, allowing the air conditioner to operate at minimal voltage.
A local workshop built a prototype and it was first tested in Ren’s laboratory to determine the relationship between voltage / current and temperature; He then went to Galveston’s lab to test his ability to kill the virus. Ren said he meets the requirements for conventional heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.
The part about heating and interfering with air conditioning systems was my concern when I first read. In this part of the country, air conditioning is essential, and trust me, nobody wants anything to interfere with it.
The creators request a gradual rollout of the filter. It makes sense that high-risk workers should get the filter first – workers in hospitals, healthcare facilities, schools, even public transportation settings like airplanes. These filters can allow workers additional protection against the germs that infect them with the virus and also allow people and school-age children to return to work and classes safely.
Protection from germs in the air is even more important than handwashing and social distancing, according to many scientists who are now asking WHO and other public health organizations to adjust the guidelines to emphasize risk.
“Respiratory drops are very large drops that when you sneeze, for example, shoot out of your mouth and fall directly onto the ground due to gravity,” Dr. Ron Elfenbein, an emergency care physician at CBSN, explained Monday. “While in the air it means that the virus can stay in the air for a long time and all you have to do is walk through a cloud of this and inhale it and you’re going to catch it.”
The smaller particles could be spread by infected individuals simply by breathing, laughing or talking, said Elfenbein, who said he agrees with the scientists behind the letter.
In some cases, those tiny particles called aerosols can travel up to 30 feet, and there is concern that they may play a significant role in the spread of COVID-19.
Scientists can argue with each other how far airborne particles travel, but social distancing six feet away is quite difficult, 30 feet is impossibly impossible. The tips and guidelines continue to change as scientists continue to learn more about the coronavirus. It is frustrating and confusing for most of us how little the experts still know about the virus. However, this new filter is really encouraging and looks like it could be a real help in containing the spread of coronavirus germs.
.
