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Two high school students, Sum Ming Wong and Kin Pong Li, both living in Hong Kong have designed and built a door handle that kills germs, thus preventing the spread of disease through hand contact. They demonstrated their handle at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair held last month in Pittsburgh—taking second place in the materials science category.
One of the ways that ailments such as cold and flu are passed is via contact, and one of the main avenues is via door handles—a sick person coughs into their hand then uses the handle to enter a bathroom, office, or other location, depositing germs. Others that enter the same room pick up the germs from the door handle and invite the germs into their own bodies by touching their eyes or noses. Door handles that kill such germs on contact would stop them from spreading—that is what Wong and Li set out to build.
The pair started by noting that a mineral called titanium dioxide is quite toxic to germs, but it hasn't been used as an antibacterial agent much because it requires the presence of UV light. To get around this problem, the team ground some of the mineral and then used it to coat a glass tube, they then affixed a LED onto one end of the tube—it shines UV light onto the insides of the glass tube—any germs that land on the outer side are then killed by the mineral (testing showed it to be 99.8% effective). Putting the glass tube onto brackets allowed for it to be used as a door handle.
Read More at PHYS.ORG
[Source]: Society for Science & the Public
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:21PM
Solid copper would never wear out and require replacement.
This thing is value engineered to require replacement annually if not more often because you've got a power feed thru a moving power cable that'll wear out and break and fundamentally its a painted handle, its going to look like crap in a year depending on how much jewelry the locals wear on their hands, etc. Finally this thing will be a lot more expensive than a block of metal.
That means they'll never allow copper to be sold once, if they can sell this thing over and over instead.
The only hope for copper would be mere copper plate designed to wear out in less than a year, aka pretty thin. Or some additive that makes it corrode super quickly so consumers want to replace it.
Something I've noticed at workplace is the glass hallway doors are freaking disgusting even with the cleaning crew wiping them every couple days. I'm not sure how well any surface treatment kills stuff that has a protective layer of a sixteenth of an inch of human grease. We're not talking about fingerprints here but being pretty much slimy.
I am surprised how well the glass permits UV light flow. Maybe they mean "journalist glass" as in its clear so its glass, but its actually expensive UV transparent quartz or something more exotic.