Decontamination of military equipment and facilities that have been exposed to deadly biological and/or chemical warfare agents is of critical concern to U.S. Armed Forces. These agents include mustard, VX and sarin. Elimination of these agents is required on the battlefield, as well as in chemical agent production, storage and destruction sites. Conventional technologies used for decontamination and sterilization suffer from drawbacks that include toxic by-products, radiation hazards to personnel, and very long time scales for the decontamination process to be effective even over small areas. The objective of our effort is to develop a processing technology based on Dc atmospheric corona discharges that can sterilize biologically contaminated objects and that can neutralize various chemical warfare agents. In Phase I we will use a high density plasma, DC atmospheric corona discharge system to neutralize chemical warfare simulants and sterilize surfaces contaminated with bacteria like E-Coli. We will study the decomposition chemistry, by-product formation and electrical energy consumption of the system and correlate this information with the decomposition rate of the simulants. Standard characterization techniques for determining the composition of the processed gaseous and liquid effluents, like gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, will be used.
Keywords: Chemical Agents Decontamination Corona Discharge Sterilization Plasma
