January 1, 2023 | By Gerald Ondrey
A collaborative research group in Japan has engineered a self-sustaining device that can detect the presence of COVID-19 particles or droplets in air. The device, which requires no batteries, employs a magnetostrictive clad plate composed of iron, cobalt and nickel, generating power via alternative magnetization caused by vibration. The vibration resonance frequency of the Fe-Co/Ni plates, which are coated with the receptor protein coronaviruses use to enter our cells, changes when the virus is absorbed, providing an indication that COVID-19 particles are in the air.
“We know that resonance frequency changes when the weight of a magnetostrictive material changes, but we set out to answer whether this is also the case when a virus is absorbed and if this absorption is detectable,” says Fumio Narita, co-author of the…