A Maltese engineer just out of university has received multiple awards in Scotland for coming up with a unique device that cleans and improves air quality for those who work from home.

Ben Sammut, who recently graduated as a product design engineer from the University of Glasgow and Glasgow School of Art, made an air filter that ‘inhales’ a person’s carbon dioxide to produce oxygen.

The filter, which he called Alka, works so long as the user ‘feeds it’ by keeping it by their side while they work.

Aside from cleaning the air from pollutants using certified natural filters, such as hemp and activated carbon, Alka also uses an algae called spirulina to capture the carbon dioxide, a pollutant linked to loss of concentration.

Ben Sammut

After two weeks, the device can turn into a watering can and the algae poured onto plants.

Alka was Sammut’s course project, for which he was awarded Best Project Certificate from the Scottish Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

The 24-year-old was further awarded the GU68 Engineers Trust Award, established for students studying engineering at the Glasgow university. The trust provided the funding for his project.

He also received the Agnes Rhind Bursary for his course result as the second-ranked mechanical engineer graduate from the mechanical engineering, product design engineering or mechanical design engineering degree programmes.

Alka was displayed on a billboard in Glasgow City Centre as an advert for the Glasgow School of Art degree, as a showcase of an exhibition of students’ work.

After being cooped up inside during lockdown last year, Sammut began to research the benefits and problems of working from home.

“Time and time again, the risks associated with poor air quality was the one issue that constantly came up,” Sammut told Times of Malta.

The idea was to create a product that coexisted with users, he said: “A form of symbiosis, where the user and product mutually benefit from one another.

“I aimed to create a different product to your average air purifier, something that creates conversation and sparks an interest in the topic of indoor air quality.”

In speaking to experts and people from both Scotland and Malta, he found there was a lack of awareness of the subject of indoor air quality. Most users, he said, did not consider air quality to be a problem since it’s an ‘invisible’ one.

“It depends a lot on where you live, what cleaning products you use, how often you ventilate but, naturally, if you open the windows and live in a congested area, then there is a risk that the air you bring in is worse than what’s outdoors.

“In a way, I tried to make the invisible more visible.”

It took him nine months to finish the project. Due to COVID-19, he was unable to access workshops to design, build and test the device and had to make do what he could get his hands on, be it cardboard, 3D printing or computer modelling – lots of it.

So will Alka be on the market any time soon?

“I’ve shelved the project temporarily,” Sammut said.

“After such a tough year, I plan to take some time off and travel. After gaining some industry experience, I would like to develop it further through real-world testing.”