A team of professors and engineers from the University of Michigan have developed a futuristic device to kill germs with cold plasma. It looks like a device from the future – a small stick which breaks is deadly to all living things beam. The development has already received an emergency grant from the National science Foundation of the USA, but to fight against the coronavirus had missed.
This sanitizer uses so-called cold plasma, which is ionized medium is generated not by heating, and pumping atmospheric air through a strong electromagnetic field. Turns out the “soup of atoms” interspersed with the remnants of molecules, in which the main active component are oxygen ions. They react with the carbon and pull it out of the molecules, thus destroying the organic structure of microbes and viruses.
The main advantage of its development, the authors name the ability to handle soft surfaces and the materials, which are difficult to decontaminate the usual ways. The absence of high temperatures, mechanical stress, toxic substances have a sparing effect on the subjects. In the future it will be possible instead of air to generate a plasma of different gases, which will allow you to selectively affect different forms of life.
Alas, the development of a commercial version of the steripod will take at least a year or so. And in the current pandemic of a good will not be, although she has already become a powerful stimulus for the development of innovative technologies that will be useful in the future.
Source — University of Michigan