Case Studies Client Stories
FILTER 8: Revolutionising Air Purification with SOLIDWORKS CFD Analysis
We can help you to manage and validate your products and designs. Check out our FEA and CFD Simulation Services for more information: https://www.solidsolutions.co.uk/professional-services/simulation-fea-cfd.aspx
View transcript
The idea was to make a difference. To actually go in there and you've done something that's worthwhile. 2006 - 2008, I was actually doing installation work in hospitals throughout the UK. And there was an issue with wards that were repeatedly going down with MRSA or with E. coli or with problems, so I set about an idea at that time but unfortunately it died a death. And then come COVID. A friend of mine said, “Would that device that you were looking at a few years ago, be useful against COVID?”. And the big thing really was to make a device that was small enough to be utilised anywhere within a room or a building that went away from light bulbs, which are traditionally fitted to air purification devices. But to go to LEDs So they were the main goals. When I started at Filter 8 I had no idea about this product. My background is in mechanical engineering, so there was a bit of a learning curve for me to understand the technology behind the product. Once I familiarised myself with the basics at that time it became evident that we needed to move forward with a plan for testing because what a lot of these papers refer to testing, testing, testing. And David was using a different technology. He started to use LEDs rather than the mercury lamps. we came to you in the first place was we knew that we could not get accurate results ourselves. With basic monitoring equipment for air flow, wind speed, this that and the other. That's all we’d got. And it can show you at the beginning what is happening and what is the air movement, and it can show you what the end is happening. It's not showing you what's happening inside and how are you going to get that residence time. There's no way measuring it, not from our point of view and not to physically see it. Furthermore, you when you when you actually look at the exhaust, which is the most important part from our perspective, you have different air flows at different levels. We didn't know which one was correct. What had we done wrong? And you can only do so much on paper, you can only do so much by a prototype and when you add and remove things, you don't know if you've made a difference. You've got to know exactly what you've done that has effected the end result. And with CFD you catalogue everything that you do at every stage with every result, so you achieve perfection. We did look originally buying CFD modelling, but given the time factors that were involved and the cost and also the fact that in any sort of training you have about six months of pain where you actually get the confidence to be able to input data and be comfortable with the results. And because CFD modelling is not something that I was familiar with, it did feel at the time that, you know, this is a step too far for me. We need to buy it in. It was the empathy that we found with Solid Solutions to understand what we were trying to achieve. I mean, we were trying to achieve F1 technology. We just wanted to know how good the box was. So in the Carlton Forest projects, obviously it was CFD SolidWorks Flow simulation was sufficient for the needs with a particle study coupled to that. And what that allows us to do was to track residence times. We’d do that in certain regions to really understand whether they were getting the, I guess the molecules and the particles in the regions they needed them to be in to actually have the effectiveness, the kill zone, as they call it, which was the the place where the LEDs were most powerful and the chemicals were likely to attach or diffuse these, you know, COVID particles or whatever the viruses might have been. So we were able to track that, we were then able to validate the velocities at those points, at various points with sensors in the physical test. And we got really good correlation almost, you know, nail on the head on quite a few occasions. There were some occasions where there might have been, you know, small discrepancies, but then we'd look at it and say, right, well, actually realistically we've got our sensor perhaps in the wrong place or we're measuring this or we've got a slightly different fan. And there was a few variables, so once we worked out what the difference was between the virtual and the physical, we corrected it and then again, really, really close. I think it was in 95% accurate. At this moment in time we have developed the device really going forward with sensors and being able to say at any one time what is happening with the air in that room, which as we know, we just can't put a great big block inside there without considering the airflow. We've had to consider very carefully what we can put in, what size we put in and where we go with it. And I think the next stage will be whether we look at producing an app so people can actually interrogate the unit and see for themselves from a visual perspective, i.e. graphs we’re also exploring the Amazon Alexa, which would actually just tell people or you could interrogate it that way. Get Alexa to say, “Well, yeah, just open a window”, or “Your air quality's not so good today. Maybe you want to think about switching a few units on”, and I think that will be a more subtle way of, of controlling the unit without panicking people. It just doesn't stop here because the need for air purification in the place of work and at home to keep everyone safe.