Wallet sterilizes bills from germs
Three Harmony Magnet Academy students presented their year-long senior class project to a group of CEOs while attending NAF’s 14th Annual Benefit honoring Ajay Banga, president and CEO of Mastercard, in New York recently.
NAF is a national network of education, business and community leaders who work with low income communities to help high school students earn an educational experience that includes industry-specific curricula, relationships with business professionals and work-based learning experiences, and just recently NAF announced four Porterville Unified School District Pathways out of 40 nationwide earned Distinguished status.
Busher Bridi, Michael Cook and Hannah Bowles worked on a wallet that sterilizes money to eliminate germs and dubbed it the Money Launderer Project.
It is a hard case wallet that uses ultraviolet, germicidal radiation technology to clean money from germs.
“We found that a lot of dangerous bacteria lie on money like E. coli, and bacteria that causes strep throat,” said Bridi.
Dollar bills are cotton based and when put under a microscope can show hills and valleys full of germs that cannot be washed.
They used a 3D printer to print out layers of plastic. It took about five hours to print the wallet they designed, and UV LED lights were then placed on one side of the wallet to clean and sterilize the money.
“Using ultraviolet sends a high sensory of light frequency into the money which enters the germ’s DNA and destructs it, so the germ is useless and sterilizes the money,” said Bridi.
This same technology is used by hospitals to clean surgical equipment that they put in boxes of UV/LED to clean off all the germs.
“We are on our second prototype, so the first prototype we made actually was pretty good, but there was some technical problems with it, like the hinge was too close to the edge so it broke off and some of the electronics wouldn’t fit,” said Bridi.
The group continues to improve on the project but are very satisfied by what they have accomplished so far, and indeed nobody else has invented anything like this, making the project a very interesting creation that they hope they can improve and someday patent.
According to Bridi, a dollar bill can be folded three times inside the wallet, and cleaned thoroughly in the span of an hour. However, the LED’s lights can cause skin irritation if left exposed for a long time, so they have placed a safety mechanism to ensure that a person wouldn’t get a skin irritation.
In improving the product, they hope that they can somehow add more battery life to the wallet to clean the money faster or not have to wait too long to charge it, but they haven’t quite figured out how to balance the weight of it just yet.