Chemicals have been used as a disinfectant for hundreds of years. The same companies are making the disinfectants that were used to combat the 1918 pandemic and the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Grant Morgan CEO and co-founder of R Zero believes this means the disinfectant industry is primed for disruption.
“You know in the 100 years that we’ve been using chemicals to fight infections. You know, we’ve sent people to the moon, we’ve invented the internet, we’ve seen the proliferation of self-driving cars, but like we’re still using archaic chemicals. It’s just one of those industries that has been void of innovation and is ripe for disruption. And so, you know, we’re here to drive that change.”
The innovation that Morgan and R Zero believe will disrupt the chemical disinfectant industry is Ultraviolet Light.
Ultraviolet light
UVC or Ultraviolet Light wavelength C, a subtype of ultraviolet light between 200-280 nanometres in wavelength. UVC is also a very powerful disinfectant, although not safe for contact with human skin, it does render microorganism’s incapable of infecting people. This is why UVC disinfecting machines are only used in empty rooms.
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic Morgan wasn’t aware of the disinfecting power of Ultraviolet light. When the pandemic hit Morgan and his co-founders wanted to help. Their first plan was to set up a platform for independent high-level cleaning and disinfecting contractors, however one discovery changed their trajectory.
The R Zero team looked at how hospitals, “Hospitals are effectively, as long as they’ve existed, a communal gathering place for the sick. And generally speaking, if you can walk into a hospital and receive care and walk out without catching any of the various different pathogens, that, you know, exist within those four walls, then they must be doing something right”
Along with wiping down surfaces using traditional chemical disinfection wipes, hospitals use UV light towers. The UV light towers are used for 7-10 minutes in an empty room and everything the light touches is disinfected.
UV light has been proven as an effective form of disinfection for over 100 years. The 1903 Nobel Prize was awarded to Niels Finsen for his work treating lupus with UV light, and it has proven effective in many other ways from treating wastewater in the early 1900’s to disinfecting hospital rooms in the 21st century.
It is currently widely used as a method of disinfecting in hospitals even at the average $125,000 price per UVC machine.
Reverse engineering a UVC machine
After discovering UVC’s efficacy as a disinfectant and seeing the simple nature of a UVC machine Morgan set about reverse engineering one for much cheaper than $125,000.
“But being a mechanical engineer, I looked at these devices and I’m like, hold on, like, that’s just a light bulb on wheels with a timer. There’s no way it can cost that much to make. And so I sort of went full mad scientist and kind of reverse engineered it, did a whole bunch of research and, and figured out that we could make one for significantly less.”
Lightbulbs that release UVC are exactly the same as traditional mercury-based light bulbs, to prevent mercury light bulbs from being damaging to human skin mercury bulbs are dipped in a white phosphorus coating to block out light at the UVC wavelength.
A reaction in ionised mercury gas emits light at a very specific wavelength of 254 nanometres. This wavelength while damaging to human skin also is a very effective disinfectant.
UVC light doesn’t technically kill viruses and bacteria, the light is at a resonant frequency that disrupts microorganisms’ ability to reproduce.
Morgan explains the process, “So that that light happens to be at, essentially, it’s at the resonant frequency of the bonds in DNA and RNA. And what it does is it creates what are called thymine dimers. And all that means is it’s basically in bonds to adjacent nucleotides in a DNA or RNA sequence, it bond’s them together.
“So when you have a dimer and those two adjacent bonds, it disrupts the process of copying the DNA sequence, or the RNA sequence. And so effectively, what it’s doing is UVC’s actually not killing anything. It’s actually inactivating things, it’s rendering them incapable of reproducing, and rendering the microorganism’s incapable of infecting or harming humans as well.”
After spending months working on a prototype and dealing with many supply chain issues caused by covid, they had created their first device, “The Arc”.
“End to end, we designed, developed, manufactured and brought to market arc in five months, and we’re really proud of that, not just because of the rate of progress and the speed of execution, but also because it is objectively the most powerful and efficacious product on the market period.”
To make The Arc more financially accessible than currently existing UVC disinfectors R Zero firstly offered the device at a more affordable price point, however the device still isn’t cheap and Morgan wanted it to be available to schools and businesses that didn’t have the money to buy a device. So, Morgan came up with a different model for the business, “So we started offering, basically a hardware as a service model, and it was a lease. So for about $17 a day, you can have unlimited use of Arc throughout your facility.”
The Beam
R Zero’s vision is for UV disinfecting to be a way to reduce all forms of indoor transmission. People spend 90% of their time indoors where they are most vulnerable to catching an illness, but UVC’s drawback is that it can’t come into contact with human skin so keeping offices or schools safe throughout the day and preventing person to person transmission with UV was a challenge.
So R Zero created The Beam, which is attached to the wall, near the ceiling of a room and shoots a beam of UVC across the top of the room. Air that people breathe out rises to the top of the room and is disinfected by the beam of UVC, before cooling coming back down while being safe to breathe.
For The Beam, R Zero also changed from mercury bulbs to LED ones, “We buy LEDs that produce light at 265 nanometres, as opposed to the 254 produced by the mercury bolts, 265 actually is closer to the true resonant frequency of those of those nucleotides in DNA and RNA. So the 265 nanometre wavelength is actually about 30%, more efficient than the 254.”
Vive
Morgan and R Zero still wanted to create a device that would both be an efficient disinfectant and be safe for contact with human skin.
R Zero found that by using a shorter wavelength of Ultraviolet Light they could make a disinfectant safe for human skin. “So, the human safe one is a novel form of UVC, called far UV. And so it’s a shorter wavelength. It’s 222 nanometres in wavelength. And the mechanism is actually pretty simple. The mechanism makes it safe. It really just has to do with the fact that that shorter wavelength light doesn’t have enough energy to penetrate the top layer of human skin.”
Studies into the risks of exposure to far UV have been conducted and show that being exposed to R Zero’s Vive device that uses far UV for 30,000 has the equivalent effect of being exposed to sunlight for 10 minutes.
This means the Vive can be left on in classrooms continuously disinfecting the surfaces and air that are exposed to the light and in turn reduce transmission of illness and reduce sick days.
Predictive modelling
All R Zero disinfecting UV products come with a software system that provides users with data on the device. Morgan wants to expand this capability by developing a predictive model to assess the risk of infection.
“Fundamentally, we know how people get sick, we know how diseases spread. Its air surfaces or person to person transmission. And there are entire fields of study around these mechanics of transmission. So, it’s, you know, physics and epidemiology, like we know how diseases spread, you can mathematically model those things. And so, what we started with was basically a statistical model of the mechanics of disease transmission. And then we layered on some computational fluid dynamics to account for, you know, air flow throughout a space. And then we’ve wrapped it in a machine learning outer layer to make it more and more predictive. And we actually can spit out a quantified percentage likelihood of one or more people getting infected in that space under those exact conditions.”
By getting the dimensions of an indoors space along with where people spend time in the space and how the ventilation works that data can be put into a predictive model, and using a digital twin of the space the AI can add R Zero products into the space and quantify by how much the R Zero products reduce the chance of infection spreading and thus the reduce the amount of sick days.
To test out R Zero’s suite of products on reducing sick days they have set up a trial in 8 Las Vegas schools. Four have the R Zero products and four don’t, they will then collect a wide range of data to assess the impact of the R Zero products.
“We’re collecting a whole bunch of data, including wastewater data, and we’re measuring the viral concentration in the prevalence of SARS COVID to and that wastewater, which gives us a very deterministic, like population level, view of the infection risk and what’s in that population, but we’re also measuring absenteeism in sick days. And so what we’re doing is we’re taking that outcome data, where we’re seeing, you know, reduction in sick days, we’re annotating it, turning it into a training data set and feeding it back to the model. But we’ve run the risk model on all of the classrooms and all of the schools that we’re doing this study in and we’re predicting what our outcomes are going to be, and they’re actually doing the work and studying what the outcome is, and then training the model with it.”
Healthy buildings
Morgan believes that Covid has opened people’s eyes to the dangers of viral transmission in indoor spaces and the response needs to be bringing technology that exists in other industries into creating healthy indoor spaces.
The healthy building movement is about requiring indoor spaces that are occupied by lots of people to consider the threat of viral transmission to the same extent building design must consider health and safety and environmental considerations.
It is not just about preventing the next pandemic but creating indoor environments that use technology to keep people protected from sickness as much as possible.
“Competition is good for humans, the more people we have working on how to solve this problem, and how to improve the health and safety of the indoor spaces that we share that, you know, the better off we’ll be, the more healthy will, will all be, and in the space is plenty, plenty big enough, you know, when we’re out raising money and talking to investors, and they ask what our total addressable market is, I can look them in the eye and I can say, literally, every indoor space in the entire world, human health is universal. And humans are an indoor species. And, I think the world is changing forever, in various different ways.”
This article was based on Engineering Matters Episode #171 Ultraviolet light: Preventing the Next Pandemic, click here to listen
