IIT Delhi Startup Builds Machine To Clean & Reuse Face Masks To Reduce Waste

The COVID-19 world has forced us all to wear masks while stepping out, and this has resulted in accumulation of lots of N-95 masks that are tossed in the garbage after using for a few weeks or months. This has been causing a considerable amount of biomedical waste.

Reuters

However an IIT-Delhi incubated startup has created a way to decontaminate these masks and make them ready for another round of COVID-19 protection.

The decontamination device is called Chakr DeCoV -- developed by Chakr Innovation. And it makes the most of ozone gas to thoroughly cleanse and decontaminate face masks. The device which awfully resembles a mini-refrigerator. However, this is, in fact, a biosafety door paired with a catalytic reduction system to keep humans safe from exposure to ozone.

The device¡¯s engineering is led by Mr Tushar Batham, VP Engineering, under the guidance of professors and researchers at IIT Delhi. It has been tested at IIT Delhi¡¯s Centre for Biomedical Engineering.

How to clean and reuse face mask

To see the effectiveness of the device, rigorous testing has also been conducted by ICMR-NIV that has revealed the inactivity of the virus on the material that N-95 masks are made of.

IIT Delhi

The device bathes the masks in ozone layer -- a gas that is not only known to be highly penetrable, effectively cleansing pores of the face mask. In case you were wondering why a not use a UV-light instead? Well, that¡¯s because UV light, much like any light is susceptible to shadows, which can cause areas to not get effectively decontaminated. An ozone gas-based setup eliminates that issue.

According to the engineers who¡¯ve developed the device the gas can effectively reduce the bacterial load on the face mask by 99.9999 percent. The machine can enable a facemask to be used for 10 more times without causing any structural damage or impacting the mask¡¯s filtration capability (as tested by SITRA).