InDetail

Indoor air is, on average, five times   as polluted as outdoor air. It can worsen allergies and asthma, and over the long term can cause respiratory diseases and cancer. Yet today’s air purifiers and HVAC systems use decades-old filtration technology, and they often miss microbes, pollen, mold and nasty airborne chemicals that cause these problems. A new air-purifying technology could help. Instead of a filter, the device blows air over a photoactivatable catalyst to create highly reactive chemicals that destroy VOCs, pollen and other allergens, and microbes. Back in the mid-1990s, Yogi Goswami, a  solar energy researcher who directs the Clean Energy Research Center at the University of South Florida, had a personal reason to switch gears and investigate air purification technology. His son Delip, who’s now 35, had severe asthma and allergies as a boy, and conventional air filtration devices did not ease them. In his previous work, Goswami helped develop a sola...