Could the Thien Cyclone Separator help with the fight against COVID-19?

[Albercook]

There is a group working on emergency ventilator designs. One of the biggest unsolved problems is filtering the output to reduce exposure. (HEPA filtration material will be in high demand) I have been thinking about a design that uses the Thien baffle and the technique of saturation of sub-micron particles. The idea is to use air that is supersaturated with water to grow the particles so they are big enough to remove by momentum with a Thien cyclone baffle. In the one reference they talk about laminar flow. I don't know if that is essential. I can't post links. PM me if you want them

Step one: Take the exhaust from a vent run it into a Thien Cyclone.
Step two: Heat the air a bit and add humidity maybe from an ultrasonic humidifier.
Step three: Cool the air a bit to allow the air to become super saturated. Since the only remaining particles are the smallest ones they will become condensation nuclei.
Step four: wait for the particles to grow.
Step five: Run the air through a second Thien Cyclone.
Step six: Clean it regularly and add some bleach to the water collection chamber.

This would have basically no moving parts.

With the flow from a vent I don't know how big this should be.
Might be good if one filter set could work over a range of flows so that multiple vents exhaust into one filter.

There is also a position paper suggesting that air filtration in the room where patients are could reduce staff exposure to droplets from coughing.
This system would need a fan.


Thoughts?
Can anyone help?

[Mikoturos]

Thoughts:

1) Mr. Thien, you really need to get together with Mr. Stone to get your design patented and get in touch with his legal contacts.

2) According to Rio Vista Andy in the Someone is Patenting Our Ideas thread this idea is apparently not completely new, just new to wood dust applicability.  Nevertheless, my thoughts are that Mr. Thien needs to lock down that patent ASAP so that, if credited if/when the micro-viral particulate separator is patented, his ducks are all in a row.

3) I, for one, am willing to toss a few PayPal bucks a la the How to Make Voluntary Contributions thread if Mr. Thien needs or wants support on the patent application fees.

I check this site in general roughly quarterly and I peek at the Someone is Patenting Our Ideas thread slightly more often.  Thanks for running the site, Phil; keep us all apprised!

--Mik

[cantfigureausername]

You only need about 40mJ/cm³ of light at 254nm to get a 4 orders of magnitude reduction. That's not quite sterile or perfect, but it's pretty good, and trivial to achieve.

Masks do not even achieve 2 orders of magnitude, and they're quite effective already. Viral load has been, and is an important factor with every comparable disease. As long as you stay significantly below the threshold, you are good to go. Breathing in a few hundred virus particles doesn't affect you. It's millions of them that you need to fear.
That's the reason why masks don't need to be 100% perfectly good to actually work -- contrary to the abundance of pseudo-scientific fake news that claim that they're useless (which was even spread by governmental officials in Feb. 2020 here). They're not useless in any way because they just do that one thing. They shift your exposure from "way above threshold" to "below threshold". Not always, not in all conditions, but most of the time, in most situations.

With the power necessary to operate a heater and a vaporator and a cyclone, you can do 100 times the dose in UV light needed to get 6 orders of magnitude reduction in your ventilation pipe. So that's basically "sterile as good as it gets" inside the pipe. UV germ reduction is a solved problem, having been in use in the food industry and in laboratories for many decades. All that's "revolutionary new" is that you want a somewhat higher dose to be on the safe side. Not suitable for COVID gold digging, sorry.