Multispectral Fluorescence Sensing of Airborne Proxy Infectious Particles in Actual Indoor Environments

Filtering airborne infectious particles from indoor air is a critical element in controlling the spread of disease during COVID and future pandemics that are transmitted through the air. The aim of this proposed research from Ratiocinative Engineering Services, LLC is to develop a testbed that will lead to more accessible and robust quality control testing of air filtration and ventilation systems in actual built environments, and thus respond to the need for air filtration to remove coronavirus or other airborne infectious diseases from indoor air spaces for people. The testbed is a low cost, field deployable device that includes the generation and measurement of streamed proxy particles as a tool to measure location-dependent effectiveness of air ventilation and/or filtration systems at removing airborne infectious particles in deployed indoor environments. The unique contribution from this particle measurement testbed is the use of the differentiated particle seeding and multispectral particle measurement (quadraspectral fluorescence) to quantify the dynamic particle flow in the building. The research will focus on understanding and overcoming the complexity of developing and deploying an airborne fluorescent proxy particle/sensor testbed for use in actual environments.