Low-temperature low-damage sterilization based on UV radiation through plasma immersion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper introduces a new type of high-frequency (HF) sustained discharge where the HF field applicator is a planar transmission line that allows us to fill with plasma a long chamber of rectangular cross-section (typically 1 m × 15 cm × 5 cm). Peculiar interesting features of this plasma source are a low gas temperature (typically below 40 °C in the 1 Torr range in argon), broadband impedance matching with no need for retuning, stability and reproducibility of the discharge (non-resonant behaviour). This type of plasma source could be useful for web processing; nonetheless, it is applied here to plasma sterilization, taking advantage of its low gas temperature to inactivate microorganisms on polymer-made medical devices to avoid damaging them. The predominant biocide species are the UV photons emitted by the discharge whereas most plasma sterilization techniques call for reactive species such as O atoms and OH molecules, which induce significant erosion damage on polymers. Polystyrene microspheres are actually observed to be erosion-free under the current plasma sterilization conditions (scanning electron micrographs have been examined). Moreover, inactivation is quite fast: 10 6 B. atrophaeus spores deposited on a Petri dish are inactivated in less than 1 min. Correlation of the UV radiation with the spore inactivation rate is examined by (i) considering the emitted light intensity integrated over the 112–180 nm vacuum UV (VUV) range with a photomultiplier; (ii) looking with an optical spectrometer at the emission spectrum over the 200–400 nm UV range; (iii) using absorption spectroscopy to determine the role of the VUV argon resonant lines (105 and 107 nm) on spore inactivation. It is found that the test-reference spores are mainly inactivated by VUV photons (112–180 nm) that are primarily emitted by impurities present in the argon plasma.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".