Team:Mingdao/Human Practices

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Overview

Motivation

Project Design

Prototype Development

Conclusion

Overview

“Human Practice is the study of how your work affects the world, and how the work affects your work.”--Peter Carr, Director of Judging.

Our main achievements of integrated human practices were to get valuable feedback for our product improvement, as well as to raise the public awareness on the issue of indoor air quality. To upgrade our prototype, we discussed with experts in different fields in algae culturing, protocol design, and product application, etc. During the discussion, we received a lot of practical and useful advices from these experts, and we further integrated those into our project and made CAirTM as our outstanding product to meet customers’ expectations.

Motivation & Brainstorming

Measurements of CO2

We measured the air quality in many places with a sensor, Air Mentor. At the beginning, we took the sensor outdoor into those places, which the sensor was measuring constantly. Thus, we could see the data of all places are begin at the ppm around 400 to 700. Except for the gym, there are no people in those places at first, and then people flocked into rapidly. The following is the details and photos of those measurements:

  1. Classroom: 40 people in one class, second class of senior second grade in Mingdao.
  2. Outdoor: On the fence outside the biolab in MingDao.
  3. TEDex Hall: 85 people in the TEDex Hall in MingDao.
  4. SUV: 3 people in Mazda CX5 with closed circulation.
  5. School Bus: 40 people in one school bus.
  6. Table Tennis Room: 42 people in one table tennis room in Ming Hung department B1.
  7. Gym: 30 to 40 people in civil sport center gym in Changhua county.

The CO2 concentration was over 3000 ppm after starting the measurement 30 mins in half the places we measured. It will make people feel uncomfortable with symptoms like headache and lethargy, but we usually don’t aware of the effects that CO2 cause to people. It is really a crucial problem for us to solve.

Project Design

Visiting department of environmental engineering in NCHU

Spot:Chung Hsing university environmental engineering department
Date:2019.01.11
After we aware of the indoor air quality of CO2, we searched for the current methods to solve the problems, which made us ask for professors of Chung Hsing university. They let us know several current ways to solve the problems by physics, chemistry and biology methods, respectively. There are absorbents like carbon or Zeolite in physics and chemistry ways to absorb CO2, but these methods take up a lot of energy and time. While the biology way, reducing the CO2 concentration by plants photosynthesis, have low efficiency. They also gave us ideas that we can use algae to reduce the CO2 indoors and the modeling of rising CO2 concentration while there are some people in closed places. Thanks to them, giving us more opinions to our project and made our solution come true !

Our Final Model

References