Today's Street Lights - An example of Innovation!

Street lights are around for many-many years to lighten up the dark corners of the roads as we all know. But can they do more than just brighten the city during nights? Today's street lights are conspicuous example of how small-small innovations can make big differences.

Today's Street lights are powered with renewable energy sources solar (we have seen this & it's nothing new for us) and wind, hence working completely off the power grid. They are an extremely useful source of light in rural areas or remote areas where grid electricity is not there. These self powered street lights can be used to send warning signals during natural calamities like floods etc when grid power fails. Today street lights are used to boast Wi-Fi signal strength, to measure air pollution and noise pollution etc.

Today's Street Light

In this league of new and interesting applications of street lights, new applications are proposed where street lights kills mosquitoes & hence prevent us from deadly disease like dengue and give flood warnings. The work has been carried out in University of Malaya, Malasiya.

Dengue is a deadly mosquito borne disease and in spite of all preventive measures 390 million people per year are infected by this virus throughout the world. Another study, of the prevalence of dengue, estimates that 3.9 billion people, in 128 countries, are at risk of infection with dengue viruses. All these facts are reported by WHO. In these circumstances, a street light that can kill mosquitoes could be a very handy tool.

Mosquitoes are attracted towards the humans because of the odor of carbon dioxide gas (CO2) that we naturally exhale. In the proposed street light, street light is made to emit low level of CO2 gas to imitate human odor to attract the mosquitoes. UV light and Titanium dioxide is combined to produce small levels of CO2 which is irresistible to mosquitoes. When mosquitoes come closer to the light and suction fan strongly suck them into a capture net that lies behind the suction fan.

Another application that is proposed is generating and sending flood warnings. In street lights all the electronics is on the top and the bottom is waterproof. Sensors could be used at the bottom of the street light (lamp post) to keep track of the rising of the water level and warning signal can be transmitted to longer distances using the wireless communication systems available on the tops of the street lights. This could be very fruitful when our conventional system fails during natural calamities like grid failure during flood etc.

These are interesting applications and are not very difficult to deploy in the areas that we know are affected by above mentioned problems because infrastructural cost may not be significant as street lights are already there in most of the places.

By Sagar Juneja - Research Associate, Chitkara University &
Monika Parmar - Assistant Professor Chitkara University Himachal Pradesh

Reference

https://www.um.edu.my/about-um/media-centre/news/2016/01/04/follow-the-light!-um-invents-mosquito-trapping-street-lamp-in-war-against-dengue