Passive, biodegradable air filtration · clair.earth ↗
Clean air usually arrives as an appliance: a purifier, a cartridge, a power draw. CLAIR (Clean Air Innovation for Resilience) is a plant-based nanofibrous material that filters incoming air through passive ventilation instead, so the window becomes the filter. No electricity while it runs, compostable when spent. The media is still under experiment in the lab.
We spin it ourselves on a benchtop electrospinning rig, iterating across polymers, fibre morphology, gradient porosity and photocatalytic coatings. Deciding what to spin is its own problem — the evidence sits across hundreds of papers, and no two report the same properties the same way.
So we built the Materials Knowledge Explorer: an internal tool that reads the literature with a language model and turns it into a searchable, rankable database. Lab time then goes to what the evidence already favours, rather than to whatever the field happens to discuss most.
- STAGE
- TRL 3–4 · concept to validated prototype
- CORPUS
- 90 papers processed
- RELATIONSHIPS
- 5,942 extracted
- MATERIALS
- 849 primary indexed
- DISCOVERY
- 100+ NSF I-Corps interviews
- AWARD
- Scott Institute inaugural · $15K
- ACCELERATOR
- NextCorps Manufacturing
- RECOGNITION
- Hello Tomorrow Deep Tech Pioneer
FIG 1.1 — Knowledge graph from a single paper, linking materials to processes and measured performance
