Team:HFLS ZhejiangUnited/Applied Design

Design of Formaldehyde-Degrading Machine with Escherichia Coli

Our project is aiming to eliminate formaldehyde in the real world, such as newly decorated houses, cars, furniture factory, etc. Basing on previous experiment results, we designed a Formaldehyde-Degrading Machine, including air pump and strainer, air diffusion device, formaldehyde-detecting and degrading device, and no-return exhaust device, etc. Our ultimate goal is to design a formaldehyde purification device. This equipment can not only alarm the excess formaldehyde but also directly biodegraded formaldehyde by the constructed bacteria, which can effectively to solve the problem aroused by formaldehyde excess. The working principle and design ideas are as follows.

To be simple, the procedure of eliminating formaldehyde is as follows:

1. Pump air into the strainer (Figure 1a), and cast off harmful bacteria and other granules simultaneously.

2. Add LB media into the container.

3. Render the resulting gas to diffuse across small pores (Figure 1b), in the purpose of maximum blending, into media containing engineered Escherichia coli.

4. Detect and degrade formaldehyde in detecting device (Figure 1c). When the concentration of formaldehyde excess, the RFP can be expressed, and the level of degradation can be manifested by the intensity of absorbance qualitatively and then by the intensity of fluorescence quantitatively, which can also be seen by the transparent solution.

5. Purified air is exhausted across the non-return valve (Figure 1d).

Figure 1 Schematic diagram of formaldehyde-degrading machine.