After news reports of a new strain of coronavirus began to filter out in December from Wuhan, the capital city of China”™s Hubei province, AtmosAir Solutions has been receiving higher-than-normal sales inquiries.
The company”™s Fairfield headquarters has been fielding telephone calls and emails from airport authorities and commercial property managers around the country to learn more about its air purification technology, while its office in Shanghai has been flooded with requests for immediate product deliveries.
“The dealers are saying to our Shanghai division, ”˜Tell the U.S. to send everything,”™ ” said Tony Abate, the company”™s vice president and chief technological officer. “They want to get every piece of equipment we have because the hysteria is at such a fever pitch.”
AtmosAir”™s bipolar ionization technology has its roots in conversations from the early 1900s between Swiss mathematician Conrad Habicht and a drinking buddy who worked in a patent office named Albert Einstein.
“Einstein had a sister that succumbed to tuberculosis,” Abate noted. “There was no cure in the early 1900s, so the recommendation was to have her go to a hospital that was very high up in the mountains. She recovered, but Einstein didn”™t just accept the fact that she recovered. He wondered why she would recover there and not somewhere else. Habicht believed it could be possible to replicate that natural conductivity with a man-made device.”
The device in question was an ion generator that was developed after World War II. For many years, the technology was more prevalent in Europe that in the U.S.
“Our technology provides air purification,” Abate continued. “It produces bipolar air ions ”” they”™re a natural element. High in the Swiss Alps, they are very plentiful. But pollution and emissions have depleted that natural supply.”
AtmosAir Solution”™s product mitigates the corruption of clean air by increasing the volume of bipolar air ions within interior spaces.
“Ions fight contaminants,” Abate added. “Think of them as little Pac Men that go out into the air and interact with the dust, particles and spores.”
The company was founded in 2004 with Abate handling its first installation at Darien”™s Board of Education. Abate pointed out that the technology does not require a massive reconfiguration of existing HVAC systems.
“The beauty is that it”™s really simple to install,” he said. “Our product adapts to the air system. We designed ionization tubes that look like little missiles. We size the product and the quantity of ionization tubes to the flow of air and the size of the space. So, an installation like Los Angeles International Airport would have 10 or 12 of our units, or we may get small installations like a commercial office that would only need one or two. Our system uses the air conditioning system like a great big fan. The air blows across the tube, the tube produces the ionization, it blows it back into the space and saturates the space with these ions that really go to work in attacking contaminants.”
The tubes need to be replaced every two years, Abate noted, although they can be cleaned out during use in spaces where the air quality can quickly become problematic, most notably animal shelters with a surplus amount of canine dander and casinos where smoking is allowed.
Abate, who is also chairman of the American Society of Heating Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers”™ committee related to standards for gas-phase air cleaning equipment, pointed out that bipolar ionization has been tested in Asia against earlier strains of the coronavirus since the beginning of this century and was shown to be effective against it.
The company”™s technology was tested against the MS2 Bacteriophage, a surrogate of the norovirus, and was shown to produce better than a 99% reduction capability.
The company has more than 7,000 installations, ranging from large stadiums to small offices. The coronavirus outbreak has brought in more sales inquiries from West Coast airports and Abate held a meeting with Facebook executives at their Manhattan complex to discuss air quality improvement strategies.
With the current coronavirus epidemic, Abate explained, the bipolar air ions “attack the virus on the surface and break it down, and not allow it to infect when it enters your body.” He warned that the outbreak “has a relatively short incubation period ”” about 14 days in the body.”
But while news reports on the coronavirus focus on a rising death toll in China and more confirmed cases on this side of the Pacific, Abate warned that situation needs to be put in perspective.
“When you are in public places, lots of people come through and carry different types of illnesses,” he said. “We”™re hearing about coronavirus, but influenza is extremely common and that has killed many more people than coronavirus. It”™s Mother Nature”™s way of telling us the air is not clean.”
