Nonthermal Plasma Assisted Photocatalytic Air Purification and Sterilization at Ambient Conditions

沿着人类社会的工业化和城市化，空气污染已成为近几十年来的重大环境健康问题，因此改善空气质量受到相当大的关注，特别是在COVID-19大流行期间，由于其空气传播特征。改善室内空气质量变得尤为重要，因为在现代社会中，人们通常在室内花费的时间（超过90%）明显多于室外。在这种情况下，已经开发了各种各样的空气清洁技术，例如过滤、吸附、臭氧化、UV光解、光催化氧化、冷等离子体和植物净化，但不幸的是，这些技术都不能有效地去除所有室内污染物，并且发现许多技术在操作期间产生不期望的副产物。因此，提出了一种创新的混合系统，结合非热等离子体和空气过滤以及颗粒过滤，提供一站式的室内空气净化和消毒解决方案。由强大的学术-工业团队在等离子体，催化，生物，空气卫生和制造领域的互补专业知识授权，该项目旨在不仅在研究原型规模上开发高度集成和具有成本效益的空气净化器，用于展示常见的VOC，病原体（例如，病毒、细菌和真菌），无机污染物（例如，氮氧化物，一氧化碳和硫氧化物），和固体颗粒物质与商业用途的可接受的寿命，但也获得了非热等离子体光催化氧化和灭活机制的深入了解。该项目的成果将为工业合作伙伴提供一个完整的工程包，使他们能够立即进行产品设计和大规模制造开发的空气净化器，其单程空气处理能力高达2，400 m3/h，以满足国内和国际市场的高端空气卫生产品，从而进一步巩固加拿大在环境创新方面的领先地位，并带来经济效益，使加拿大成为一个更美好的居住地。

Along with the industrialization and urbanization of human society, air pollution has become a significant environmental health problem over recent decades and improving the quality of the air has therefore received a considerable amount of attention, especially in the period of COVID-19 pandemic due to its airborne feature. Improving indoor air quality has become particularly important as people generally spend significantly more time (more than 90%) indoors than outdoors in modern society. In this context, a wide variety of air cleaning techniques such as filtration, adsorption, ozonation, UV photolysis, photocatalytic oxidation, cold plasma, and botanical purification, have been developed but unfortunately, none of these technologies are able to effectively remove all indoor pollutants and many are found to generate undesirable by-products during operation. An innovative hybrid system combining nonthermal plasma and photocatalysis as well as particle filtration is thus proposed for providing a one-stop indoor air purification and sterilization solution. Empowered by the strong academic-industrial team with complimentary expertise in the fields of plasma, catalysis, biology, air sanitation, and manufacturing, this project aims to not only develop a highly integrated and cost-effective air purifier at research prototype scale for showcasing the complete removal of commonly encountered VOCs, pathogens (e.g., virus, bacteria, and fungi), inorganic pollutants (e.g., NOx, CO, and SOx), and solid particle matters with acceptable lifetime for commercial use, but also gain an in-depth understanding of the nonthermal plasma-photocatalytic oxidation and inactivation mechanism. The outcomes yielded from this proposed project will feed the industrial partner a complete engineering package, enabling their immediate product design and massive fabrication of the developed air purifier with one-pass air processing capacity up to 2,400 m3/h for satisfying the domestic and international market with a high-end air sanitation product, thus further solidifying the Canada's leading position in environmental innovation with economic benefits and making Canada an even better place to live.