Home | NAU 2014 Capstone, Portable Sanitization Chamber

Project Overview

The project the team is undertaking is sponsored by W.L. Gore & Associates. They are more famously known for their fabric product called GORE-TEX®. They have given the team a limited budget to design and produce a portable sanitization chamber for use in the medical industry.

The chamber will sanitize various materials in a variety of sizes. Such items include hemostats, a tackle box, or a cleanroom approved notebook. Such items have complex geometries and may be damaged by heat based processes or those that may be corrosive.

This product might be used to reduce bioburdens on items within a manufacturing process, for sanitizing materials for entry in cleanroom, and for sterile hospital settings. Such a product would have to be safe and easy for users to operate.

Project Goal

The client currently has access to sterilization systems that use either harsh chemicals, or a large amount of heat that can damage various materials. The client needs a current sanitization device that is portable and safe for various materials such as plastics and papers.

The goal of the project is to develop a portable sanitization process that sanitizes bioburden amounts past acceptable levels and that is safe for various materials.

Explored Concepts

After some research, the team has eliminated such processes such as infrared radiation and pressurized steam. To the left, is the idea of using a hydrogen peroxide fog to sanitize the various materials. This is a dry fog and will not moisten any of the surfaces. This technology is used to sterilize whole hospital rooms.

We are also looking into lasers that will sweep over objects and sanitize them. This will offer a unique way to disinfect. It requires low power but may require more time than acceptable to sweep over the object.

Using an array of UV lights will allow the chamber to sanitize various materials but only their surfaces. They take the same about of power as other florescent bulbs using about 20W per bulb. This technology is already used in hospitals to sanitize whole rooms in about 4 minutes.

This is a demo run of our prototype.

The unit was built in accordance to requested capabilities by W.L. Gore who is funding this project. They requested that it be a portable chamber that can sanitize various objects which may be sensitive to other sanitizing/sterilizing processes. They also wanted something with a short cycle time and that it be easy to use. We believe that we met and exceeded all these goals. The process is safe for most objects (including cellphones, paper, plastic, etc) and effectively sterilizes bacillus atrophaeus spores in 90 secs.

We had limited testing and due to our first results our shortest time tested was 90 seconds total. If we had more tests, we would test even shorter times for further optimizing