Development of a validated, residue-free and mobile disinfection process for surfaces in hygienically demanding clean rooms based on cold atmospheric plasmas
IGF 15469 N
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.