UVC Disinfection Box

Overview:

D-Lab: Design focuses on addressing problems faced by underserved communities with a focus on design, experimentation, and prototyping processes. I worked in a three-person team tasked with developing a prototype of a UVC LED sterilizer for low-resource clinics in rural regions of South Africa to decrease cases of hospital-acquired infections. The team routinely consulted the doctor who proposed the project, held interviews with other South African doctors, and worked with them to determine design requirements that addressed their needs.

My contribution:

• Designed in SolidWorks and fabricated the sterilization chamber with sheet metal bending.

• Identified novel application of quartz glass rods that reduced prototyping costs of the device by 10 times and exposed entire surface area of items to UVC light for comprehensive sterilization.

• Assembled electronic breakout boards and programmed state machine setup in  C++ to set up controlled sterilization runs and implement user safety interlocks and feedback.

• Analytically modeled heat dissipation from LEDs to validate the enclosure maintaining an outer temperature within a specified comfortable-to-handle range.

Deliverable:

• Working prototype of UVC LED sterilizer

• Folder containing team's research, CAD files, design calculations and history documents, firmware files, bill of materials, and budget.