Nonthermal Plasma Assisted Photocatalytic Air Purification and Sterilization at Ambient Conditions

随着人类社会的工业化和城市化，近几十年来，空气污染已经成为一个严重的环境健康问题，因此，由于空气污染的空气传播特性，改善空气质量受到了相当大的关注，特别是在新冠肺炎大流行期间。改善室内空气质量变得尤为重要，因为在现代社会中，人们在室内的时间通常比在户外的时间要长得多(超过90%)。在这种背景下，各种空气净化技术，如过滤、吸附、臭氧氧化、紫外光分解、光催化氧化、冷等离子体和植物净化，已经被开发出来，但不幸的是，这些技术都不能有效地去除所有室内污染物，并且许多在操作过程中会产生不良的副产品。因此，提出了一种结合低温等离子体和光催化以及颗粒过滤的创新混合系统，以提供一站式室内空气净化和杀菌解决方案。该项目拥有强大的学术-工业团队，在等离子体、催化、生物、空气卫生和制造领域拥有丰富的专业知识，旨在开发一种高集成度和高性价比的研究样机规模的空气净化器，展示如何完全去除常见的VOCs、病原体(如病毒、细菌和真菌)、无机污染物(如NOx、CO和SOx)以及具有可接受使用寿命的固体颗粒物，并深入了解非热等离子体-光催化氧化和失活的机理。这一拟议项目的成果将为产业合作伙伴提供完整的工程方案，使他们能够立即进行产品设计和大规模制造所开发的空气净化器，该空气净化器具有高达2400立方米/小时的单程空气处理能力，以高端空气卫生产品满足国内外市场，从而进一步巩固加拿大在环境创新方面的领先地位和经济效益，并使加拿大成为一个更好的居住地。

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.