Three undergraduates created the prototype as part of Aggies Against COVID-19.
A team of Texas A&M University Students from the College of Engineering and the Mays Business School teamed up to create a portable air purifier to adress COVID-19.
Valentina Alarcon and Juan Cuellar from the College of Engineering and Leticia Gomes from Mays designed the prototype through Aggies Against COVID-19, a virtual design competition that invited students of all majors to identify and solve problems related to the pandemic. After placing in the top 10 teams, the group was admitted into the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (iCorps) Site Fellows program, through which they conducted customer discovery.
Called AIRA, the portable air purifier aims to use bipolar ionization, an emerging technology that kills viral particles by releasing both positive and negative ions in the air, catalyzing a chemical reaction on the virus’ membrane and essentially deactivating the virus.
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