AirHack 2.0: Air Pollution Mitigation in Schools

ChangeFusion and FabCafe Bangkok co-hosted AirHack 2.0 during 28-29 September 2019 at FabCafe Bangkok. The event was a hackathon that gathered more than 20 students from 4 schools to design and create prototypes of air pollution mitigation devices to be installed in schools that are affected by PM2.5 air pollution.

Near the closing of the event, participants presented six innovative and practical ideas as follow:

Group 1: Air Watch

Is a unit that fountains water vapour to cover its radius. The unit is activated when detected nearby movement of students, which is actually triggered by detecting a bluetooth signal from app installed on student's smart watch or smart phone. The small water molecule would bind with dust particle, making them settle onto the ground.

Group 2: Folitrom Air

Provide an alternative to mask as a personal protection, by using nose plugs with filter instead. The plugs are kept in a case which serves as a notifier when the user is near the area where dust concentration is high. The is done by connecting the data with the smartphone app which use the public dust data. Plugs can be made comfortable and fashionable. The size of the plugs can also be customised to fit individual wearer.

Group 3: Diy Airchiller

Use the same principle as factory's air cooler to cool and reduce dust at the same time, by combining heat from the roof with the turbined vapour generated from piezoelectric system. Excess moisture are managed by using silica gel to draw out the moisture from the system.

Group 4: Zephyr

An air purifier unit which uses a biological filter made from fruit fermenting into cellulose. Users can choose to buy or make their own filter in 3 to 30 days. The unit will have multiple sensors to detect the amount of dust at various stages of filtering as a way to check the remaining life of the filter. The unit can be put on a table or hang on a wall, and can be made into different sizes.

Group 5: Cell Wall

A wall unit that sucks the polluted air from outside, puriies it, then blows the purified air into the other side by using piezoelectric principle. The unit can be installed as a standalone wall, or as a window.

Group 6: Knock your Socks off

Use students' socks as cleaning agent by putting microfibre cloth under the socks. When students walk around the school, the microfibre will accumulate the dust particles automatically. At the end of a day, the students put out the microfibre and put them on a cleaning machine which uses negative ion combined with a fan to detach dust particles from the fibre. The particles which gather up on the bottom of the cleaning unit can be made into pencil lead or ink.

For these six projects, ChangeFusion will support the teams to develop proposals in order to be considered for a grant from Thai Health Promotion Foundation to make the working prototypes.