Cold plasma as a fast acting alternative disinfection method

Abstract

Cold plasma disinfection is a cost-efficient and, above all, fast way of disinfecting even complex products. There are already approaches where plasma disinfection is used for wound treatment or hand disinfection. The ionization of a gas results in a number of physical and chemical processes that have a damaging effect on microorganisms. Especially in the field of medical device reprocessing, a tool that can reliably disinfect even very complex products in a short time would be a great asset. In this work, the potential of a newly developed cold plasma disinfection device was tested for the reduction of microbiological contamination and thus the disinfecting effect. In order to examine this microbiological reduction 3D printed scaffolds with contaminated test plates were used. This was done with different concentrations of the bacteria in the cold plasma disinfection process to determine the maximum germ reduction effect. In a first test run, the maximum effect of germ reduction was achieved with log 3.6. By making further changes and increasing the disinfection cycles, it was possible to increase the germ reduction to log 4.7. If these values are confirmed and can be improved by further modifications (e.g. increasing the plasma concentration), cold plasma technology represents a very good alternative to conventional disinfection methods.

Keywords

• reprocessing
• cold plasma
• disinfection