Black & Veatch partnership has a hand in Covid-19 'air vaccine'
Black & Veatch has helped create a way to purify the air of pathogens — including Covid-19 — in real time.
The Overland Park-based firm worked with Energy Cloud Inc., a clean-tech company that focuses on energy efficiency, sustainability and healthy building environments to create the Hummingbird EQ.
Black & Veatch Program Director Lance Lippencott and Energy Cloud CEO John Carrieri told the Kansas City Business Journal that the Hummingbird system has been proven to deactivate 99.5% of Covid-19 virus by decomposing pathogens without producing any harmful ozone or byproducts.
A building's indoor air quality is continuously monitored by the Hummingbird system, which collects data. The system has a QR code scanner that shows visitors the air quality, and the historical data of the air quality. Every building with the system will also have a unique URL, which could be beneficial for schools or marketing information.
“We don’t want to just say that we’re purifying the air. We want to prove that we are purifying the air,” Carrieri said. “Both employees and customers want to know that the buildings they are going in are safe.”
Photocatalytic oxidation is used beyond deactivating the virus. It breaks down the organic compounds that could be circulating the air. The actual infectious dose that was aerosolized during testing was 3,000 times the average infectious dose, proving the Hummingbird unit can thoroughly neutralize and remove active Covid virus from the air that passes through the system.
“Even though they are invisible, they are there, and they are affecting our health,” Carrieri said. “Essentially, we are the vaccine for the air.”
A year ago, Lippencott was helping build biosafety laboratories in Ukraine and previously used similar technology, working with scientific partners to research other pathogens. With this history, Black & Veatch determined that working with and funding Energy Cloud’s Hummingbird project was a good fit.
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“We already knew a lot about pathogens and were trying to control bad stuff to make sure it doesn’t go into good places,” Lippencott said.
When the pandemic hit, Black & Veatch provided hard data science to help the company independently test the product against the virus.
“We basically adopted some technologies that we found were being used in fertility labs,” Carrieri said. “We tried to make that very expensive technology more commercially available for all commercial buildings so we can make all buildings healthy.”
The Hummingbird system is scalable and can be adopted into any size of commercial building. Existing systems typically cannot support filters or other traditional methods of controlling pathogens in the air. The Hummingbird deactivates Covid without the extra filtering, Carrieri said, making it easy to adopt to any HVAC unit.
https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2021/08/13/black-veatch-energy-cloud-hummingbird-air-vaccine.html