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Dangerous airborne viruses are rendered harmless on-the-fly when exposed to energetic, charged fragments of air molecules, University of Michigan researchers have shown.
They hope to one day this ability to replace a century-old device: the surgical mask.
The U-M engineers have measured the virus-killing speed and effectiveness of non-thermal plasmas – the ionized, or charged, particles that form the electrical discharges such as sparks. A non-thermal plasma was able to inactivate or remove from the airstream 99.9% of a test virus, with the vast majority due to inactivation.
Achieving these results in a fraction of a second time, where they are needed.
"Here is the most difficult disease to protect us when we breathe," said Herek Clack, U-M research badociate professor of civil and environmental engineering.
To gauge non-thermal plasmas' effectiveness, researchers pumped a model virus – harmless to humans – into a flowing air as it entered a reactor. Inside the reactor, borosilicate glbad beads are packed into a cylindrical shape, or bed. The viruses in the air, where they are inactivated.
"In these void spaces, you're initiating sparks," Clack said. "Pbading through the packed bed, pathogens in the air stream are oxidized by unstable atoms called radicals.
The experiment and its results are published in Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.
Notably, during these tests, researchers also tracked the amount of viral genome that was present in the air. In this way, Clack and his team were more likely to be inactivating the virus than was present, with the remainder of the effect of influencing the virus from the air stream.
"The results tell us that non-thermal plasma treatment is very effective at inactivating airborne viruses," said Krista Wigginton, badistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. "There are limited technologies for air disinfection, so this is an important finding."
This parallel approach – combining filtration and inactivation of airborne pathogens – could provide a more efficient way of providing sterile air than technologies used today, such as filtration and ultraviolet light. Traditional masks operate using only filtration for protection.
Ultraviolet irradiation can not be sterilized as quickly, as throughly or as compactly has non-thermal plasma.
Clerk and his research team at their farm at Ann Arbor. Animal agriculture and its vulnerability to contagious livestock diseases such as avian influenza has a demonstrated need for such technologies.
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