Photo by Chieko Hara
Left to right, Douglas Hutchings with Arkansas Research Alliance, Caleb Talley with Startup Junkie, Hugh Churchill, and graduate students Jeb Stacy and Shiva Davari.
With simple, inexpensive supplies available at any general department or home improvement store, Hugh Churchill is building and testing portable air filters that help remove infectious airborne particles — including the respiratory droplets that carry coronavirus — from indoor spaces.
And he wants to show you how to build one yourself. All you need is duct tape, a basic box fan and commercially available air filters.
“While masks and vaccines are polarizing topics,” said Churchill, associate professor of physics, “there shouldn’t be anything controversial about clean air. These devices facilitate that. They provide an additional layer of protection that could be widely deployed to make our K-12 and university indoor spaces healthier during this wave of the pandemic. And they’re easy and inexpensive to build. My 9-year-old built one.”
Churchill, a member of the Arkansas Research Alliance Academy of Scholars and Fellows, studies condensed matter and quantum materials to develop or improve devices that help people and the environment. For example, researchers in his lab focus on spiraling chains of selenium and tellurium, two materials that, when used in nanowires, show promise in the next generation of digital technology, solar energy and quantum computing.
But this project and others have taken a temporary back seat to fighting COVID-19. For several weeks, Churchill has been working with U of A Facilities Management and the Arkansas Research Alliance to build a prototype of a simple box-fan filter that helps purify room air and test its performance.
“Improving filtration and ventilation in classrooms is a common recommendation to help fight the spread of COVID-19 and improve indoor air quality,” Churchill said. “There are commercial products that do this, but they can be cost-prohibitive. Our teachers and school districts have worked extremely hard and used many tools to keep our kids’ classrooms safe. This is one more tool to help them.”
PURIFYING AIR – HOW IT WORKS
Within the facilities and HVAC communities, there is a burgeoning movement nationwide to make indoor spaces as safe as possible. Relying on open-source and simple do-it-yourself designs by air-quality experts, citizen scientists and amateurs have joined this movement, fashioning their own homemade air purifiers.
Churchill brings a higher level of scientific credibility to the fabrication and testing of an essentially homemade box-fan filter. Part of his work with nanoscale electronic devices focuses on eliminating air particles, which can ruin devices. And, for 15 years, Churchill has worked …….