Plasma-in-a-bag for sterilizing devices
Friday, November 27, 2009 - 21:21
in Physics & Chemistry
The practice of sterilizing medical tools and devices helped revolutionize health care in the 19th century because it dramatically reduced infections associated with surgery. Through the years, numerous ways of sterilization techniques have been developed, but the old mainstay remains a 130-year-old device called an autoclave, which is something like a pressure steamer. Now researchers in the Netherlands are developing a new way to sterilize medical devices by sealing them inside plastic bags and then using electromagnetic fields to create plasmas -- partially ionized gasses that contain free electrons and reactive ions.