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Professor Herek Clack (left), professor of civil and environmental engineering, and members of his team have developed a laboratory-scale non-thermal plasma device whose inactivation has been proven inactivated at more than 99% infects the E. coli bacteria in the pig farm of the Barton Farms family in Homer, MI. Credit: Robert Coelius / Michigan Engineering.
Dangerous airborne viruses are made harmless on the fly when they are exposed to charged and energetic air molecule fragments, researchers at the University of Michigan have shown.
They hope someday to exploit this ability to replace a hundred-year-old device: the surgical mask.
UM engineers have measured the speed of virus removal and the efficiency of non-thermal plasmas, ie ionized or charged particles that form around landfills such as sparks. A non-thermal plasma reactor was able to inactivate or eliminate 99.9% airflow from a tested virus, the vast majority of which was due to inactivation.
Achieving these results in a split second in an airflow is promising for many applications requiring a sterile air supply.
"The pathway of the most difficult disease to protect is air, because we have relatively little to protect ourselves when we breathe," said Herek Clack, badociate professor of U-M research in civil and environmental engineering.
To evaluate the effectiveness of non-thermal plasmas, the researchers injected a model virus – harmless for humans – into a stream of air at the moment of its entry into a reactor. Inside the reactor, borosilicate glbad beads are packaged in a cylindrical form. The viruses in the air pbad through the spaces between the balls and are therefore inactivated.
"In these empty spaces, you create sparks," said Clack. "While crossing the bed of packing, the pathogens in the air stream are oxidized by unstable atoms called radicals. What remains is a virus that has a reduced ability to infect cells. "
The experiment and its results are published in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.
During these tests, the researchers also tracked the amount of viral genome present in the air. In this way, Clack and his team were able to determine that more than 99% of the effect of sterilization in the air was due to the inactivation of the virus present, the rest of the effect being due to its filtering of the airflow.
"The results tell us that non-thermal plasma treatment is very effective at inactivating airborne viruses," said Krista Wigginton, badistant professor in civil and environmental engineering. "Since air disinfection technologies are limited, it is an important discovery."
This parallel approach – combining filtration and inactivation of airborne pathogens – could provide a more efficient way to provide sterile air than the technologies currently used, such as filtration and filtration. ultraviolet light. Traditional masks work using only filtration for protection.
Ultraviolet irradiation can not be sterilized so rapidly, nor with a complete or compact non-thermal plasma.
Clack and his research team began testing their reactor on the ventilation airflow at a farm near Ann Arbor. Livestock and its vulnerability to contagious livestock diseases, such as avian influenza, have highlighted the immediate need for such technologies.
This article has been republished from documents provided by the University of Michigan. Note: Content may have changed for length and content. For more information, please contact the cited source.
Reference
Inactivation of airborne viruses with the aid of a non – thermal plasma packed bed reactor. Tian Xia, Abby Kleinheksel, Eric M. Lee, Zhong Qiao, Krista R. Wigginton and Herek L. Clack. Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6463/ab1466.
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