The qual­i­ty re­quire­ments for prod­ucts and pro­ce­dures in­crease con­tin­u­ous­ly in dif­fer­ent areas of in­dus­tri­al pro­duc­tion, e.g. elec­tron­ics, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and food in­dus­try, biotech­nol­o­gy, au­to­mo­tive in­dus­try as well as in the med­i­cal field. This re­sults in an in­creas­ing de­mand of op­er­a­tions in clean rooms. There­by ap­prox­i­mate­ly 70 % of the clean room areas in Eu­rope today have spe­cial hy­giene de­mands on the air and sur­face clean­li­ness. In order to en­sure a safe pro­duc­tion and in­fec­tion pro­phy­lax­is, an ef­fi­cient clean room clean­ing and a safe sur­face dis­in­fec­tion are in­dis­pens­able. The clean­ing and dis­in­fec­tion of clean rooms rep­re­sents an eco­nom­i­cal­ly very at­trac­tive mar­ket with big growth po­ten­tial for the clean­ing en­ter­pris­es. This re­sults on the one hand from the growth of the clean room ca­pac­i­ties, on the other hand from the in­creas­ing at­ten­dance of the clean room op­er­a­tors for the out­sourc­ing of the clean room clean­ing and dis­in­fec­tion to ex­ter­nal sup­pli­ers. The open­ing up of this mar­ket po­ten­tial as­sumes that the clean­ing en­ter­pris­es can meet safe­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly all fu­ture de­mands with re­gard to clean­ing and dis­in­fec­tion of clean rooms. Such de­mands are caused both by spe­cial re­quire­ments of the clean room op­er­a­tors and by cur­rent de­vel­op­ments in the field of stan­dard­i­s­a­tion and guide­lines for clean rooms. Es­pe­cial­ly the chem­i­cal sur­face clean­li­ness gets in­creas­ing­ly im­por­tant. Ac­cord­ing to DIN EN ISO 14644, part 8, cur­rent­ly used chem­i­cal dis­in­fec­tion agents are de­clared as a source of con­tam­i­na­tion. There­fore mean­ing­ful for hy­gien­i­cal­ly de­mand­ing clean room areas are ef­fec­tive and eco­nom­i­cal dis­in­fec­tion pro­cess­es. A pos­si­ble so­lu­tion is of­fered by the plas­ma tech­nol­o­gy. At a cer­tain pa­ram­e­ter set­ting of the cold at­mo­spher­ic plas­ma de­vice and by using com­pressed air re­spec­tive­ly car­bon diox­ide as pro­cess gases could be achieved a suf­fi­cient germ re­duc­tion. The de­vel­oped plas­ma dis­in­fec­tion method was proved to be both bac­te­ri­ci­dal and fungi­ci­dal. This was per­formed ex­em­plar­i­ly for the ther­mal­ly re­sis­tant bac­te­ria En­te­ro­coc­cus fae­ci­um as well as for the fun­gus As­pergillus niger. In the fol­low­ing the de­vel­oped dis­in­fec­tion pro­cess was test­ed in dif­fer­ent sen­si­tive in­dus­tri­al clean rooms. Ad­di­tion­al­ly were for­mu­lat­ed rec­om­men­da­tions and in­struc­tions for the ef­fec­tive, eco­nom­i­cal, ma­te­ri­al pro­tec­tive and safe han­dling of the plas­ma tech­nol­o­gy.

The IGF-pro­ject 15469 N of the re­search as­so­ci­a­tion Europäische Forschungs­ge­mein­schaft Reini­gungs- und Hy­gien­etech­nolo­gie e.V., Cam­pus Ficht­en­hain 11, D-47807 Krefeld, was sup­port­ed via the AiF with­in the fund­ing pro­gramme „In­dus­trielle Gemein­schafts­forschung und –en­twick­lung (IGF)“ by the Fed­er­al Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs and Tech­nol­o­gy (BMWi) due to a de­ci­sion of the Ger­man Par­lia­ment.

The re­search re­port is avail­able on re­quest from FRT.