Prof King Lun Yeung
PhD in Chemical Engineering
Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Professor, Division of Environment and Sustainability
Director of France-HKUST Innovation Hub
Director of HKUST-AP EnviroSci Ltd Joint Laboratory on Health and Environmental Innovations
Associate Director of Environmental Central Facility
A irborne respiratory diseases cause some of the most devastating epidemics and pandemics of the last century. Today, the world has just emerged from the grip of COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 180 million people infected with the disease and close to 4 million hospitalized deaths since it was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Besides its human toll, the economic cost of the pandemic is staggering with the Asia Development Bank, estimating the cost to range from US$2 to US$4.1 trillion. There is an urgency to develop new and effective technologies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious respiratory diseases. This project aims to develop a new family of task-specific antimicrobial ionic liquids (TSAILs) designed to attack different biological compartments and processes along different inactivation pathways to prevent the emergence of tolerant and resistant strains in the microorganisms. The assembly of TSAILs on capture surfaces will be manipulated to increase the antimicrobial potency of the material against viruses, bacteria, molds, and spores, while keeping people and the environment safe. Thin-film casting and electrospinning processes will be used to fabricate these materials into ultralow flow-resistance TSAILs air filters that can rapidly and effectively capture and disinfect infectious droplets aerosols from the air. Besides laboratory research, a prototype TSAIL air filtration unit will be designed and built for field trials to assess the overall performance under practical use conditions.
