Fine Sprays for Disinfection within Healthcare
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1260/1750-9548.6.2.149Abstract
Problems exist worldwide with Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI's). The Spray Research Group (SRG) have been working with relevant industries in developing a product which can provide a delivery system for treatment chemicals for surfaces, including the design and testing of a novel Spill-Return Atomiser (SRA) for this purpose. A comprehensive description of this atomiser has already been given. This paper reports on a new application of this atomiser and discusses the problem of spray coating for disinfection that has been considered very little in previous work. The related spray coating performance tests in developing the product are thus provided. The experimental work includes determining the required spray duration and the coverage area produced by different sprays, including the analysis of the effects of atomiser positions, configurations, and the required number of atomisers. Comparison is made with the efficacy of an ultrasonic gas atomiser that is currently used for this purpose. The investigation has found that the utilisation of fine sprays (10μm>D32>25μm) at high liquid pressure (<12MPa) and low flow rates (<0.3 l/min) is suitable for surface disinfection in healthcare applications (i.e. MRSA, VRSA etc).
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