The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) on Sunday announced that it had built a solution to sanitize currency notes, electronic gadgets, and papers in an automated, contactless way in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The DRDO’s Hyderabad based lab, Research Centre Imarat (RCI), has developed an automated contactless UVC sanitisation cabinet, called Defence Research Ultraviolet Sanitiser (DRUVS). The cabinet has been “designed to sanitise mobile phones, iPads, laptops, currency notes, cheque leafs, challans, passbooks, paper, envelopes, etc.” the DRDO said in a statement.

“The DRUVS cabinet is having a contactless operation which is very important to contain the spread of the virus,” it further said.

The cabined sanitizes objects placed in it with the help of UVC.

The cabinet is equipped with proximity sensor switches that are clubbed with drawer opening and closing mechanism. The opening and closing mechanism can be controlled with the sensor switches without actually touching the cabinet making its operation automatic and contactless.

The DRUVs cabinet provides a 360-degree exposure of UVC to the objects that are placed inside the cabinet for sanitisation. Once the sanitisation is complete, the system goes in sleep mode. The operator thus does not need to supervise the machine to switch it off and need not wait or stand near the device.

Apart from this, the RCI lab has also developed an automated UVC sanitising device specifically for currency notes called NOTESCLEAN.

“Bundles of currency notes can be sanitised using DRUVS, however, disinfection of each currency notes using it will be a time-consuming process,” the DRDO said.

The lab has developed this particular sanitising technique to speed up the sanitisation of currency notes. The operator has to simply place the loose currency notes at the input slot of the device. The device then picks up each note one by one and passes it through a series of UVC lamps for complete disinfection.

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