Air Filtration System Inspired by Butterfly Wings

Innovation: Industry

Metalmark Innovations

2020

Image: Егор Камелев / Pixabay / CC BY - Creative Commons Attribution alone

Capture, Absorb, or Filter Chemical Entities

Living systems often require chemical elements and chemical compounds, including complex sugars, proteins, and odor-making compounds, to perform critical activities. These compounds exist in various states–solid, liquid, and gas–and are ubiquitous in soil, water, and air. This requires that living systems not only have ways to capture, absorb, or filter them, but also ways to differentiate among them, selecting those that are valuable or harmful. For example, mangrove trees live with their roots in salty water and sediments. Various mangrove species have different strategies for removing salt from the water they take in so that their tissues can use the fresh water.

Search this Function

Capture, Absorb, or Filter Gases

Oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen are all gases of particular importance to living systems. Living systems obtain these gases from water and air by trapping them, absorbing them across surfaces, or filtering them. Gases are low in density and viscosity, and when dissolved in liquids, are very low in concentration–so extracting them requires specialized strategies. As a result, living systems use the properties of gases, liquids, and solids to assist in capture, absorption, and filtering. For example, fish gills have many filaments to create a large surface area to maximize how many blood vessels come in close contact with oxygen dissolved in the water.

Search this Function

Catalyze Chemical Breakdown

Life depends upon the building up and breaking down of biological molecules. Catalysts, in the form of proteins or RNA, play an important role by dramatically increasing the rate of a chemical transformation––without being consumed in the reaction. The regulatory role that catalysts play in complex biochemical cascades is one reason so many simultaneous chemical transformations can occur inside living cells in water at ambient conditions. For example, consider the 10-enzyme catalytic breakdown and transformation of glucose to pyruvate in the glycolysis metabolic pathway.

Search this Function

Metalmark uses 3-D nanostructured materials to break down and filter out contaminants in the air.

Benefits

Increased air quality
Reduced air pollution
Reduced contaminants

Applications

Residential and commercial buildings

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 3: Good Health & Wellbeing
Goal 11: Sustainable Cities & Communities
Goal 15: Life on Land

The Challenge

Air pollution is a growing worldwide problem. According to the US EPA, indoor air quality is often two to five times worse than outdoor air, which is where humans spend nearly 90% of their time.

Innovation Details

Inspired by the high surface area created by nanostructures on the surface of butterfly wings, Metalmark has developed 3-D nanostructured materials with similarly high surface area that function as highly effective filters. They work by increasing contact with catalysts capable of breaking down pollutants such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), ultra-fine particulates, and odor-producing chemicals below 0.3 microns. When used in an air cleaning system, they breaks down pollutants without the formation or release of secondary contaminants.

Watch how Metalmark was inspired by butterfly wings to reduce air pollution.

Biological Model

Butterfly wings have a very high surface area created by a two-tiered nanoscale texturing. The ridges and bumps are so small that they can interact with light at various wavelengths and with water on a molecular level. Metalmark was inspired to use a similar nano texturing to produce the very different effect of increasing exposure to their air-cleaning .

See Related Content

photo of blue and black butterfly on orange flower with a yellow flower to its left

Biological Strategy

Wing Surface Self-Cleans

Morpho butterfly

High surface-area wing texture of Morpho butterfly sheds water and dirt via hydrophobic microstructure.

Ray of Hope Prize

The Ray of Hope Prize® celebrates nature-inspired solutions addressing the world’s biggest environmental and sustainability challenges. Created in honor of Ray C. Anderson, founder of Interface, Inc. and a business and sustainability leader, the $100,000 Ray of Hope Prize helps startups cross a critical threshold in becoming viable businesses by amplifying their stories and providing them with equity-free funding. The prize shines a light on the innovative, nature-inspired solutions that we need to build a sustainable and resilient world. Metalmark Innovations was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Ray of Hope Prize.

AskNature