Demand surges for escalator disinfecting fitment created by German startup amid COVID-19
Tanja Nickel and Katharina Obladen were still in senior high school when they patented a concept to disinfect escalator handrails using UV light.
Ten years later, their small German startup UVIS can barely match orders from around the world for their coronavirus-killing escalators and coatings for supermarket trolleys and elevator buttons.
“Everybody wants it done yesterday,” Obladen, 28, told AFP at the company’s workshop in central Cologne.
“The pandemic has made businesses realise they have to spend money on hygiene precautions for staff and customers. It’s gone from nice-to-have to must-have.”
As Germany starts to relax some lockdown restrictions, the startup’s five-person team has been inundated with requests from shops, offices and cafes wanting to reopen to a public newly alert to medical risks lurking in shared spaces.
Contest
Friends since kindergarten, Nickel and Obladen were 17 and 18 years old if they entered an inventors’ competition.
Worried about the swine flu pandemic at the time, they wanted to come up with something to make public places germ-free.
Inspired by New York City’s make use of ultraviolet radiation to sterilise normal water, they designed a UV light box which can be built into escalators to disinfect handrails, with rays destroying the DNA of disease-causing micro-organisms.
They asked their own families for help filing the patent.
“They knew us and knew we'd stick with it,” Obladen recalled.
After finishing university, the pair founded UVIS in 2016 with seed money from programmes for startups. They remain a rare example in Germany of women running an engineering firm.
This season, the duo added an antimicrobial coating with their line-up, not predicated on UV technology. The invisible coating can be sprayed onto surfaces to destroy mould, bacteria and viruses just like the novel coronavirus, using the self-cleaning properties of titanium dioxide.
Dangerous
Europe’s largest elevator and escalator makers-Thyssenkrupp, Schindler, Otis and Kone-were early customers, putting the women’s ultraviolet light boxes, called Escalite modules, in escalators in malls, hospitals and train stations.
However the coronavirus has seen demand explode.
“We’ve already surpassed our income target for 2020,” said 27-year-old Nickel, declining to provide figures.
Interest has been especially strong in Europe and Asia. The startup recently shipped over 30 escalator modules to Singapore.
Standing in the same workshop where her electrician grandfather used to tinker away and where his old hard hats still line the shelves, Obladen demonstrated the way the light box works.
Three blue-glowing UVC lamps, emitting the strongest sort of UV beams and highly dangerous when subjected to skin and eyes, line the within of a rectangular metal case.
The escalator’s handrail passes through the case since it continually loops around, obtaining a full stream of germ-killing radiation.
The metal case, roughly the size of an adult arm, and an accompanying power box could be fitted into any escalator, which Obladen said was “the largest challenge”.
UV disinfection had been routinely used in the food industry and hospitals worldwide before COVID-19 spurred wider demands the technology.
In China, where in fact the virus first emerged, it's been used to completely clean buses and banknotes.
Obladen said they too were considering other ways to deploy UVC light.
Source: www.deccanchronicle.com
