Coming Soon

« Company Overview
73,628
2020-06-01 to 2021-02-28
Feasibility Studies
Since 2015 we have been popularising that we should handwash for 2-rounds of 'Happy-Birthday', by building games/science festival exhibits. We showed many children went from it and, for one day at least, sang 'Happy-Birthday' in the toilets. However, what will we do when soap/detergent/bleach gets scarce, as producers/warehouse staff and delivery-drivers fall sick, supply-chains break, and the local supplies in homes/hospitals/warehouses/cruise-ships run out? To prepare for that eventuality, we designed a faucet that can clean with unheated water, without soap. Moreover, when soap, bleach and other additives are available, this device makes them far more effective. Field hospitals need a minimum of water and electricity to run: with this, our device can clean hands/PPE/ventilator parts and food trays etc. The faucet works by passing sound down the stream of water. It has been proven to remove all manner of contaminants. It is safe for skin, and highly effective at removing bacteria and fungi. It was scheduled for an NHS-pilot to clean the contaminant that causes variant-CJD ('mad cow disease'), one of the most difficult contaminants to eliminate. That pilot is now postponed because of COVID-19, and we wish to alter the device in one way, to allow its use more widely for removing Coronavirus. That amendment will prevent the small amount of water droplet-ejection at the nozzle exit: the ejected droplets are clean, uncontaminated water, but we cannot provide a product that ejects droplets, even with no risk of contamination, in an environment where everyone should be automatically avoiding droplets. Our 6-month workplan will eliminate this droplet-ejection, removing an obstacle that is stopping us scaling-up production to supply the new-build hospitals (in the first instance) and the cruise ships to use these faucets, and for existing establishments to replace existing taps with them as needed. We then wish to further scale-up to supply homes, so that cleaning with warm soapy water can be made more effective; and so that those items we currently must clean in unheated water (salad, fruit) or mildly heated water with low concentrations of chemicals (the skin of babies) can be effectively cleaned. When such faucets are widely used, they will be equally effective from day one of the next pandemic, without the need to wait 12-months for vaccines and cures. The average hand washing lasts 6s, not the recommended 20s: our faucets should make those 6s as effective as 20s under a traditional faucet. An extension for impact funding will allow Sloan Water Technology Ltd. (SWT) to conduct work to improve the manufacturability of expensive and complex parts of our ultrasonic water-tap, through design for manufacture and working with suppliers to reduce their piece cost at volume. These complex parts are critical to the performance of the device, so addressing these issues earlier on in the development cycle will reduce risk of any changes made and remove the additional testing that would be required if the changes were introduced later in the cycle. In this way we hope eventually to make widely available ultrasonic water-taps that perform two functions. The primary function is that, when soap is available, people will get, within the 6s the average person devotes to handwashing, a cleaning experience equivalent to 20s under a traditional water-tap. The secondary function is that when soap is not available (because of interruptions or delays to the production/distribution/supply chain because of illness, or panic-buying, for households, ambulances, clinics, Nightingale hospitals, cruise ships etc.) especially at the start of a pandemic, a useful level, of cleaning can still be achieved. In this way we hope to break the chain of infection from person-to-person, not just for viral pandemics such as COVID-19, but for future pandemics, which may be bacterial or fungal and for which the vaccines developed to combat COVID-19 will be ineffective.