So can I get a show of hands how many of you in this room
have been on a plane in this past year?
That's pretty good.
Well, it turns out that you share that experience
with more than 3 billion people every year.
And when we put so many people in these metal tubes
that fly all over the world,
sometimes, things like this can happen
and you get a disease epidemic.
I first actually got into this topic
when I heard about the Ebola outbreak last year.
And it turns out that although Ebola spreads through
these more range-limited, more tropical routes,
There's all these other sorts of diseases
that can be spread through the airplane cabin.
The worst part is
when we take a look at some of the numbers,
it's pretty scary.
So with H1N1,
there was this guy who decided to go on the plane
and in the matter of a single flight,
actually spread the disease to 17 other people.
And then there was this other guy with SARS
who managed to go on a 3-hour flight
and spread the disease to 22 other people.
That's not exactly my idea of a great super power.
When we take a look at this, what we also find is that
it's very difficult to pre-screen for these diseases.
So, when someone actually goes on a plane,
they could be sick
and they could be in this latency period
in which they could actually have the disease.
And they could, in turn, spread the disease
to so many other people in the cabin.
And how that actually works is that right now
we have air coming in from the top of the cabin
and from the side of the cabin as you can see in the blue.
And then also, that air goes out throught hese very efficient filters
that eliminate 99.97 percent of pathogens near the outlets.
And what happens right now, though,
is that we have this mixing air-flow pattern.
So if someone were to actually sneeze,
that air would get swirled around multiple times
before it even has a chance to go out through the filter.
So I thought, clearly, this is a pretty serious problem.
I didn't have the money to go out and buy a plane,
so I decided to build a computer instead.
It actually turns out that with Computational Fluid Dynamics,
what we're able to do is create these simulations
that give us higher resulutions
than actually physically going in and taking readings in the plane.
And how, essentially, this works is
you would start out with these 2D drawings --
these are floating around in technical papers around the Internet.
I take that and I put it into these 3D-modeling software,
really building that 3D model.
And then I divide that model that I just built into these tiny pieces.
And then I tell the computer where the air goes in and out of the cabin,
throw in a bunch of physics,
and basically sit there and wait until the computer calculates the simulation.
So what we get with the conventional cabin is this:
you'll notice the middle person sneezing,
and we go "Splat!", right into people's faces.
It's pretty disgusting.
And from the front, you'll notice those two passengers
sitting next to the central passenger,
not exactly having a great time.
And when we take a look at that from the side,
you'll also notice those pathogens
spreading across the lenth of the cabin.
The first thing that I thought was, "This is no good."
So I actually conducted more than 32 different simulations
and ultimately, I came up with this solution right here.
This is what I call a patent-pending Global Inlet Director.
With this, we're able to reduce pathogen transmission
by about 55 times
and increase fresh air- inhalation by about 190 percent.
So how this actually works is
we would install this piece of composite material
into these existing spots that are already in the plane.
So it's very cost-effective to install
and we can do this directly overnight.
All we have to do is put a couple of screws in there
and you're good to go.
And the results that we get are absolutely amazing.
Instead of having those problematic swirling air patterns,
what we have is we can create these walls of air
that come down in between the passengers
to create these personalized breathing zones.
So you'll notice that if the middle passenger here
is sneezing again,
but this time, we're able to effectively push that down
to the filters for elimination.
And the same thing form the side,
we're able to directly push those pathogens down.
So if you take a look again now at the same scenario
but with this innovation installed,
you'll notice the middle passenger sneezes,
and this time, we're pushing that straight down into the outlet
before it gets a chance to infect any other people.
So you notice the two passengers sitting next to the middle guy
are breathing virtually no pathogens at all.
Take a look at that from the side as well,
it's a very efficient system.
And in short, with this system, we win.
When we take a look at what this means,
what we also see is that this not only works
if the middle passenger sneezes,
but also if the window seat passenger sneezes
or if the aisle seat passenger sneezes.
And so with this solution, what does this mean for the world?
When we take a look at this from the computer simulation
into real life,
we can see from with this 3D model that I built over here
essentially using 3D printing,
we can see those same air flow patterns coming down right to the passengers.
In the past, the SARS epidemic actually cost the world