Browsing by Author "Hoskins, Clare"

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    Resilient and agile engineering solutions to address societal challenges such as coronavirus pandemic
    (Elsevier, 2020-05-28) Goel, Saurav; Hawi, Sara; Goel, Gaurav; Thakur, Vijay Kumar; Agrawal, Anupam; Hoskins, Clare; Pearce, Oliver; Hussain, Tanvir; Upadhyaya, Hari M.; Cross, Graham; Barber, Asa H.
    The world is witnessing tumultuous times as major economic powers including the US, UK, Russia, India, and most of Europe continue to be in a state of lockdown. The worst-hit sectors due to this lockdown are sales, production (manufacturing), transport (aerospace and automotive) and tourism. Lockdowns became necessary as a preventive measure to avoid the spread of the contagious and infectious “Coronavirus Disease 2019” (COVID-19). This newly identified disease is caused by a new strain of the virus being referred to as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2 (SARS CoV-2; formerly called 2019-nCoV). We review the current medical and manufacturing response to COVID-19, including advances in instrumentation, sensing, use of lasers, fumigation chambers and development of novel tools such as lab-on-the-chip using combinatorial additive and subtractive manufacturing techniques and use of molecular modelling and molecular docking in drug and vaccine discovery. We also offer perspectives on future considerations on climate change, outsourced versus indigenous manufacturing, automation, and antimicrobial resistance. Overall, this paper attempts to identify key areas where manufacturing can be employed to address societal challenges such as COVID-19.
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    Using circular economy principles to recycle materials in guiding the design of a wet scrubber-reactor for indoor air disinfection from coronavirus and other pathogens
    (Elsevier, 2021-02-12) Shishkin, Andrei; Goel, Gaurav; Baronins, Janis; Hoskins, Clare; Goel, Saurav
    An arduous need exists to discover rapid solutions to avoid the accelerated spread of coronavirus especially through the indoor environments like offices, hospitals, and airports. One such measure could be to disinfect the air, especially in indoor environments. The goal of this work is to propose a novel design of a wet scrubber-reactor to deactivate airborne microbes using circular economy principles. Based on Fenton’s reaction mechanism, the system proposed here will deactivate airborne microbes (bioaerosols) such as SARS-CoV-2. The proposed design relies on using a highly porous clay-glass open-cell structure as an easily reproducible and cheap material. The principle behind this technique is an in-situ decomposition of hydrogen peroxide into highly reactive oxygen species and free radicals. The high porosity of a tailored ceramic structure provides a high contact area between atomized oxygen, free radicals and supplied polluted air. The design is shown to comply with the needs of achieving sustainable development goals.