Condominiums and high-rise apartment buildings are often designed with ineffective corridor ventilation. In these buildings, fresh air is pumped into the hallways and then pulled into individual units. This means that most of the air in a unit comes from beneath the condo door, and can be full of tobacco, allergens, pollutants and dust from nearby construction sites.
Bordin Racing Inc. envisioned a lightweight retrofit that could be easily installed by a condo owner to help filter out most of these unwanted pollutants. Faculty and student researchers from the Mechanical Engineering program at George Brown College helped the company with suggestions for prototype refinement and fabrication, as well as research on building codes and testing.
The solution was a partial weather stripping of the apartment unit entry door while maintaining a modified opening with a custom filtration device—essentially “trapping” pollutants before they enter the unit while still allowing air to flow.
The company took the student designs and research and refined them, moving to the manufacturing stage and extruding the design in plastic. The product — now called the Door Filter — is equipped with a dense particulate filter capable of eliminating pests, allergens and even unpleasant odours or unwanted noise or light. It has been patented in six countries with three design patents and is being sold in Canadian and international markets. Door Filter has attracted a great deal of interest among international contractors eager to find a cost-effective, non-intrusive solution to high-rise living.
“We knew the concept could work. We knew it was a good idea. It was really a matter of where to go next. That’s why we came to George Brown. Help from the college was a great asset…it became almost a conversation in itself about the product’s credibility,” says Andrew Bordin, CEO and founder of Bordin Racing.
