An industrially scalable process for imparting poly (ethylene terephthalate) (PET) with durable and rechargeable antibacterial functions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), especially those caused by different antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and multidrug resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa are of growing concern in healthcare facilities. Since 1995, overall incidence rates of MRSA in Canadian hospitals have increased 19-fold, leading to unnecessary suffering by patients and increasing costs to hospitals. There have been many reports that link pathogen-carrying hospital textiles and cases of infections. The development of effective, durable and rechargeable antibacterial healthcare textiles is expected to impede the transmission of infectious microorganisms, and act as an additional prevention measure to infection control. N-chloramines have been proven to be one of the most suitable antimicrobial agents to be immobilized onto healthcare textiles to impart them with potent and rechargeable antimicrobial functions. However, the majority of the hospital used medical textiles are synthetic fibers which are chemically inert and hard to be chemically modified with N-chloramine functions. This study focuses on developing an industry scalable process to durably immobilize N-chloramine onto poly (ethylene terephthalate) (PET), a common synthetic fiber used in healthcare textiles. Many techniques have been reported till now to activate the chemically inert PET surface with reactive functional groups. Among all the techniques, aminolysis and plasma treatments have attracted great attention due to their easy process to introduce functional group onto PET and can be set up for large production. However, aminolysis suffers from polymer degradation and plasma treatments suffer from less deposition which hinders these two processes to produce commercial antibacterial textiles. In this study, a new combined process was introduced by combining aminolysis and plasma treatments in a specific way that not only minimize the problems associated with these two processes but also can create more N-chloramine precursor functional groups onto the surface of PET. The covalently bonded N-chloramine precursor groups can be easily converted to N-chloramine by dilute sodium hypochlorite solution. The presence of nitrogen on the PET substrates after the modification was confirmed by CHNS/O elemental analyzer and ATR/FTIR analysis showing a successful incorporation of N-chloramine precursor. The morphology of the treated fibers was kept relatively similar with a slight decrease in their diameter. Moreover, the tensile strength of the treated fabric was also acceptably maintained. The N-chloramine modified PET presented highly effective antimicrobial properties, even after 50 home launderings the rechargeable treated fabric demonstrated 100% reduction of both MRSA and P. aeruginosa within a contact time of 5 min.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".