Hridank Garodia, a 17-year-old innovator and sustainability advocate from Mumbai, who has developed Aerovive - a microalgae-based air purification system that captures carbon dioxide ten times faster than terrestrial plants.
Compact yet efficient, Aerovive performs the work of 40 houseplants in a single unit, offering a practical and scalable solution for healthier indoor air.
Key Takeaway:
A Personal Problem Sparked a National-Level Innovation: Hridank’s journey began with something simple: fatigue and headaches in a new school building. When he discovered CO₂ levels reaching 1500 ppm — far above the threshold affecting cognition — he decided not to wait for a solution. His personal discomfort grew into a deeper investigation that ultimately led to Aerovive.
Turning Microalgae Science Into a Scalable Real-World System: The challenge wasn’t proving that algae absorbs CO₂ — that was already known. The real difficulty lay in making the system predictable, safe from contamination, and capable of continuous performance in real-life environments. Hridank spent years overcoming biological instability, airflow challenges, and contamination risks to build a stable, modular system.
Version 2 Taught Him the Hardest Engineering Lesson: A stronger pump seemed like an upgrade — until pressure imbalances created leaks and invalid data. Version 2 taught Hridank that “more power” is not always “better engineering.” This failure shaped the design of Version 3, where he balanced airflow, improved sealing, and redesigned the reactor layout for stability and accuracy.
Mentorship Shifted His Thinking About Design & Usability: A key piece of advice from an IIT Bombay professor changed his entire approach: a product will only scale if users instinctively know how to use it. This made him redesign Aerovive to reduce user steps, automate key functions, and simplify maintenance — making it more market-ready.
Manufacturing, Not Awareness, Is the Biggest Barrier: While people quickly understand the importance of indoor CO₂ when shown the data, manufacturing a novel biological–mechanical hybrid device is far more challenging. Factories are reluctant to take on unproven innovations, leading to long negotiations, high MOQs, and technical complexity — the biggest bottleneck for scaling Aerovive.
The Invisible Heroes Lab Revealed a Gap Between Science & Adoption: One student’s blunt question — “If this works, why isn’t everyone using it?” — made Hridank realize that innovation alone isn’t enough. There is a huge gap between scientific knowledge and real-world deployment. This moment reinforced his mission to make environmental science accessible and inspire young minds to question everyday problems.
A Vision for India’s Indoor Air Future: Hridank imagines a future where indoor spaces display air-quality metrics just like outdoor pollution boards. He envisions widespread adoption of biological systems — bio-panels, hybrid purifiers, and living technologies — becoming standard in buildings. He hopes young innovators take the lead in shaping the next decade of air, water, and environmental breakthroughs.Hridank Garodia, a 17-year-old innovator and sustainability advocate from Mumbai, who has developed Aerovive - a microalgae-based air purification system that captures carbon dioxide ten times faster than terrestrial plants.
Compact yet efficient, Aerovive performs the work of 40 houseplants in a single unit, offering a practical and scalable solution for healthier indoor air.
Chethan K (Host): Hi Hridank, Welcome to EdexLive.
Hridank Garodia (Guest): Thank you. Thank you for having me here.
Chethan K (Host): You discovered CO₂ levels as high as 1500 ppm in classrooms. What was the exact moment when you realised, “I have to build a solution myself” instead of waiting for an existing one?
Hridank Garodia (Guest): This story is actually very funny. I moved to a new school building and I expected to have better infrastructure, more concentration as one would expect. But surprisingly so, me and many of my classmates, we experienced more fatigue, headaches, and loss of concentration. Initially ofcourse, I brushed it off, maybe I thought, okay, this is like a single-day event, maybe tomorrow will be better. When it happened consistently, I realised that there's this thing called sick building syndrome, when you stay in an indoor space for too long, there's a lot of indoor CO2 and other pollutants that build up which can cause fatigue, headaches, and poor concentration and the more I read about it, the more frustrated I became because existing air purifiers that are there only remove particulate matter and other pollutants, but they don't have much focus on carbon dioxide. Then I realised that there's no device that's purely built around CO2 reduction, and that's what I decided to focus on, and that's what really drove me to create Aerovive.
Chethan K (Host): Microalgae-based filtration is technically complex even for adult researchers. What was the biggest scientific difficulty in translating a simple idea into a working, scalable system like Aerovive?
Hridank Garodia (Guest): That's a very good question. The core challenge here wasn't proving that microalgae can reduce CO2, that's already proven by past research. Making a system that can behave consistently, predictably in real rooms and not just controlled experiments within laboratories. The three main things that I feel were the challenges: one is predictable. Algae growth is very variable. It can fluctuate with temperature, light, nutrient levels, and early reactors have behaved differently on a hot afternoon versus a cool morning and I had tests, I actually conducted this research and I found that certain tests showed that the same setup behaved completely different on different times of day and this predictability was the first challenge that I faced.
2. Safety
Since it's a living culture, the contamination is also a massive issue. If anything unwanted gets inside the device, the culture will die very fast. Creating a bioreactor which has certain seals, certain technical requirements such that contamination is not an issue, that was the second technical difficulty that I faced and the third difficulty of this threefold is making the device process continuous, because algae, microalgae in particular grow very fast but they also plateau very soon because their population reaches a maximum. If the density of the microalgae get too high or the nutrients run out, CO2 uptake will drop sharply and creating this continuous performance is another technical difficulty that I faced. There were a lot of challenges along the way.
Chethan K (Host): Your prototype evolved from basic tubes and boxes to an automated, modular system. Which version taught you the toughest engineering lesson — and what failure or breakthrough changed the entire direction of Aerovive?
Hridank Garodia (Guest): That's a good question. My prototype actually consists of three versions, three broad versions. Obviously there's been sub-iterations within those, but there’s version one, version two, and version three and if I had to say one version that taught me the toughest engineering lesson, it would probably be version two, for the pure reason that, initially version one, it was a very basic pump, and so when I went to version two, I made it a stronger pump which pushed air into the bioreactor at a much higher rate and on paper it does sound like it means better contact, better mixing, and more CO2 fixation per minute.
But the crucial challenge that I faced here, or the lesson that I learned, was like managing the inflow and the outflow because the outflow of air wasn't as fast as the inflow, which created these micro pressure points at certain edges of the reactor, which led to tiny leaks along the joints, which wasn't too dramatic, but it was enough that the un-treated room air started mixing with the processed air, and so the efficiency data was skewed and the readings made very little sense because of this fundamental issue.
What I did to combat this, I designed a version three for this. The first thing I did was I did the math, I saw the inflow versus the outflow rate and I was able to balance them. I also created modular shorter reactors instead of one long column to improve the pressure pockets, and I created obviously more robust sealing so that we didn't have those leaks anymore and I also learned something from it so the fact that the increase in power doesn't always mean the system is better and that was my fundamental toughest engineering lesson that I faced.
Actually, I've been working on this project now for about four years. I believe I began in the ninth grade, ninth summer. First there was a lot of background research that really went into seeing, like is this fundamentally feasible?
When I did that background research based on prior literature, I then needed to optimize the photosynthetic efficiency for carbon and other pollutant capture. I conducted research in a laboratory where I optimized these certain metrics for the microalgae. I used a certain species of microalgae called Chlorella vulgaris, and I optimized this.
Then I used these optimum conditions to create a device that, as I mentioned earlier, solved these three fundamental problems, the one that seems predictable, safe, and continuous and I created the first prototype, and then first prototype was extremely basic, obviously just as a proof of concept. Then I went to the second prototype, which was much more advanced, but I spoke about the issues with the second prototype as well and then I went to the third prototype, which is currently the prototype. But I mean there's future development also that I envision.
Chethan K (Host): You worked with experts from IIT-B and Harvard. What was an insight or advice from these mentors that completely shifted the way you approached bio-design and sustainability?
Hridank Garodia (Guest): I remember one professor at IIT-B, he told me this one thing about designing anything that's user friendly or scalable, and that he told me that a product will only scale when the person who's using the product doesn't need to be explained how to use it. Very simply, it just means that if I'm giving people such long, long instructions about, this is what you do, this is how you run it, this is how the product works, then he said it won't end up scaling then because people only purchase what's instinctively gone work, and if they don't instinctively know how something's gone work, they have less trust over it.
That was also something I learned from version two and I was able to improve that in version three by reducing some of the user steps, such as simplifying the refills, adding auto-calibration of the gas pump. Some of those technical details were also fine-tuned after this advice that I got.
Chethan K (Host): Aerovive performs the work of 40 houseplants in a single unit. As you move toward deployment across corporate parks, schools, and clinics, what are your biggest challenges?
Hridank Garodia (Guest): Obviously a lot of these are very important problems. Policy, of course, is a little bit further down the road because we haven't come to that because it's just been piloting right now in private spaces. Policy right now has not been an issue yet. Obviously that's further down the road, we are gone look at that in the future. I would say currently manufacturing is the toughest issue that we are facing because Aerovive, firstly, the device is novel and patent pending, and it mixes biology with hardware. Most manufacturers, at least from what I've explored till now, are used to only building either entirely electronic or fluidic systems and not a combination of both.
Getting someone to take on manufacturing a one-of-a-kind innovative novel design requires very long discussions and prototype demonstrations, and very high initial MOQs. Many of these places actually that I've contacted want proven volume before committing to manufacturing them, which is literally a paradox for any new technology. That's one of the fundamental problems that we faced. Apart from this, awareness is also a problem, but it's surprisingly easier by comparison because once people see their indoor carbon dioxide jump to 1,200 plus parts per million in a room, the problem itself is very self-evident, like the way I realized it, other people will also realize it. Awareness is more of a communication challenge, while manufacturing is more of a structural challenge and I think manufacturing is definitely more critical of a problem.
Chethan K (Host): Your education initiative has already reached over 1,000 students. What’s the most surprising reaction you've seen from the kids when they first discover algae or bacteria? Has any moment made you think, ‘This is exactly why I started this’?
Hridank Garodia (Guest): What I've really learned about children when doing these sessions is that they tend not to be polite.
They just tend to brutally honestly say what they're thinking and one thing that I remember is in one workshop, a 14-year-old was looking at certain algae cultures, he said, if this is such a valid solution, why don't offices, clinics, gyms already use this stuff if CO2 really is that big of a problem? and he wasn't trying to be sarcastic when saying it.
He was just being straightforward and I really didn't have an answer because I wasn't able to tell him that this is the reason that it's not being implemented already.
To me, it just unveiled this real gap between science and real adoption and that moment reminded me why I really began both Aerovive for this real adoption and the Invisible Heroes Lab for this educational program in the first place, which is to get students and eventually organizations to question these basics such as what we can do to improve even the most basic things, to question that.
Chethan K (Host): Balancing research, prototypes, school, and national-level science fairs is no small feat. How do you handle the pressure?
Hridank Garodia (Guest): That's a great question. For me, I tend to focus on these two main aspects critical to my life. Number one is prioritization.
I essentially try to plan my work around the entire week, and it's planned by the category of how important it is. So certain thing is non-negotiable, like I have to do it regardless of what my situation is, for example, schoolwork, other deadlines, those have to be done regardless of what the situation is.
So they go in top priority and then everything else gets slotted below that, following a prioritized manner and that really, even if I'm not able to complete everything, as long as I'm going from top priority to lower, I'm able to do the most important things, and I think that really helps me and it stops me from overcommitting as well and the second thing that I rely on very strongly is systems. I try to have a system for my life, I would say, in the way I do things.
For example, when it comes to experiments, I keep detailed experiment logs, checklists — I have to check Aerovive, I have to check this part of Aerovive, that part of Aerovive — and fixed routines for when I have to maintain my prototype and it removes this burden on me that I have to take a decision now, should I check it now, should I check it tomorrow? I have these systems like every week at this time and on this day, I will check this. Those systems really help me move forward in that sense and handle the pressure.
Chethan K (Host): If Aerovive reaches your dream scale, how do you envision indoor air in India changing in the next decade? What role do young innovators like you play in shaping that transformation?
Hridank Garodia (Guest): If technologies like Aerovive do scale in the future, I hope to see — number one, actually, I've begun seeing. I don't know if you've noticed this, but nowadays when there's a new building being constructed in a metropolitan area, I live in Mumbai now and I believe it's compulsory, I've been seeing this at least, I see air pollution guidelines, like on the side of the building or like PM 2.5 at X value, PM 10 at X value. I think this mandate by the government is really considering this air pollution to be a real issue, which I'm very glad to see. But what I think should also happen is this should come indoors as well.
This mandate for having air quality display should go into indoor spaces like schools, offices, clinics, where they should also have CO2 and AQI screens the same way these buildings also have them on the outside. This is the first thing that I hope to see.
The second thing that I hope to see from this project, maybe 10 years in the future, is living systems integrated into a large-scale infrastructure. That’s exactly what Aerovive is.
Its microalgae, which is a living, breathing system integrated into indoor spaces and I want to see more of these types of things: bio-panel, hybrid biological–mechanical purifiers, and I want these to become the standard in infrastructure and not just like special features that maybe one clinic or one school will have and I do think the role of student innovators in this is very crucial, because I hope that my work can show that students can also build serious deployable solutions in the real world.
I hope the next decade will see many of these students come up with many innovative new projects on maybe air, water, food systems and microbial engineering. That’s what I want to see.
Chethan K (Host): My final question is how is Aerovive different from other purifiers which are already available in the market?
Hridank Garodia (Guest): The fundamental difference—number one, normal purifiers are one may have at home, they purify only PM 2.5, PM 10 particles.
They’re unable to actually purify carbon dioxide because the filtration process that it uses just doesn't have that capability. There’s some ionization process which they use which just cannot do it.
That's the first fundamental reason why Aerovive is different, because Aerovive can do filtration of both these particulate matter particles along with carbon dioxide, which really makes it truly novel.
Apart from that, thanks to my research in a laboratory, I've been really able to optimize this process for purification. I think I've really been able to make it efficient and rapid, which also I think would make Aerovive quite innovative.
Chethan K (Host): Hridank, thank you very much for being here. It was wonderful talking to you and all the best for your innovation and future.
Hridank Garodia (Guest): Thank you so much. Thank you, I had a great time.