UMD: Can a Little Duct Tape Help Fix the Pandemic?

While they look a bit like a last-minute high school science projects, the odd gadgets that students were making all last week in the School of Public Health Building get anything but a failing grade at enhancing indoor air quality.

Known as Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, they’re just an everyday box fan that sucks air through furnace filters capable of capturing viruses and other particles from the air. Add some cardboard and tape, and each costs only about $65 to make, compared to several hundred dollars for similarly effective commercial air filtering devices.

The device was designed by a college engineering dean and an air-filter manufacturing company CEO soon after the start of the pandemic; the idea to build them at Maryland and distribute them to the community came from Dr. Don Milton, a professor of environmental health and director of the Public Health Aerobiology, Virology and Exhaled Biomarker Laboratory (PHAB Lab), who’s using a portion of the funds that he received from becoming an MPower professor last fall to pay for the supplies.

Milton has long been a leader in getting people to understand air hygiene; his expertise in the tiny suspended particles known as aerosols has been instrumental to our understanding of how COVID-19 is spread.

“The inspiration is really that I think we need to be offering clean air out to the community, getting people to understand that when we talk about layers of protection, one of the layers of protection that we can do—that doesn't require necessarily wearing masks, and it can continue after we take our masks off—is cleaning the air,” Milton said. “These Corsi-Rosenthal boxes are a way of cleaning the air and doing so pretty efficiently.”..

https://today.umd.edu/can-a-little-duct-tape-help-fix-the-pandemic