SBIR Phase I:Automatic Touch Screen Disinfection (COVID-19)

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I is to equip any personal and public touch screen displays with self-disinfection capabilities. Touch-screen technology is an integral part of everyday life in applications such as personal smartphones, industrial and medical equipment, and public touch screen stations. These screens are convenient but become a hotspot for harmful germs and bacteria. The use of touch screens could mitigate the social distancing policies of the COVID-19 pandemic. This project will develop an ultrasonic disinfection method to mitigate the spread of pathogens across such surfaces. A wide array of applications could follow including: banks (ATMs), retail (groceries POS stations, vending machines, restaurant order stations), transportation (self-check kiosks, border control stations, plane’s infotainment systems, automotive dashboards), medical equipment, government buildings, museums and tourist attractions, art and entertainment (interactive kiosks), and consumer electronics (smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, laptops, touch screen equipped appliances). Primary benefits of the methods would include speed and ability to disinfect with high frequency, elimination of need for manual labor to disinfect by this method, and expected safety to the user. This SBIR Phase I project will demonstrate the efficiency of ultrasonic disinfection process using discrete piezoelectric transducers. Because these elements are not transparent, they could be integrated with touch screen only by attachment at the periphery of the display glass. This configuration will allow a basic feasibility study for a proposed disinfection method. The project will use a novel thin film piezoelectric technology where transducers are fabricated across an entire display glass surface using thin film deposition and patterning method. This configuration is beneficial since it would not require additional device area or thickness beyond the current display glass product dimensions. Moreover, this design is not limited to small display form-factors and could be scaled to a larger display size. A thin film piezoelectric system is energy efficient in operation. The disinfection process will be characterized at wide ranges of ultrasonic frequencies and powers, and illustrated for coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and bacterium (E. coli). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.