Battling COVID-19 with UV Sanitation

Concept Generation

Working with a team, we were tasked to find a potential market gap for the application of UV surface disinfection. UV disinfection for water and air streams is already well documented and established, but less so for surfaces. The concept was also to be focused around automation or minimal human interaction required. The team pursued my pitch for sanitation of door handles - a very common touchpoint. Another interesting concept I pitched was using quadcopter drones affixed with a UV light source to autonomously sanitize large stadiums.

Irradiance Field Calculator

A critical part of UV sanitation is determining the “dose” applied to the surface. Using open source software, SMath, I created a standalone application for my team to more easily understand how a particular light source and its arrangement impacts the required exposure time.

Safety

Considering the required dose to inactivate SARS-CoV-2 and the recommended exposure limits, the initial concept of disinfecting the door handle was deemed unsafe. After raising my concern with the team, I instead proposed that we pursue a device that can crawl across crash bar doors to completely enclose the harmful UV light.

I aided in the design of the prototype produced at LIMDA, providing cost-effective yet safe ideas to quickly get a product to show prospective investors.