A new machine for high-flow air disinfection in life science, healthcare and commercial settings is being marketed by US-based Aerobiotix Inc, located in Ohio.
The device, called the Aerobiotix T1 Air Disinfector-Recirculator, is a mobile unit designed to be used in enclosed spaces that require a significant reduction in airborne microbial load. The system rapidly draws in contaminated room air, inactivates airborne viruses, spores and bacteria via an internal ultraviolet (UV) field, and recirculates the cleaned air back into the room.
Physician and inventor, David Kirschman, MD, came up with the idea after becoming concerned about healthcare air quality, particularly contamination with antibiotic-resistant organisms.
The system has been independently tested and validated at the Center for Microbial Community Systems and Health Research at the Research Triangle Institute. In a controlled laboratory setting, a single pass through the device running at standard 450 ft3 per minute of air, the Aerobiotix T1 inactivated: 100% of viruses (MS2 Virus), 99.97% of bacteria (Staphylococcus epidermidis) and 99.91% of spores (Bacillus atrophaeus).
The company says the mobile unit draws contaminated air in at its base and expels cleaned high volume, low velocity air from the top of the unit creating a continuous circulation without disruptive air currents.
The Aerobiotix T1 system uses a patent-pending reactor technology that is said to dramatically increase the efficacy of UV exposure and the efficiency of its microbe inactivation effects. This 3D-UV reactor technology forces the airflow under pressure through a matrix of thousands of crystalline lenses. Simultaneously, multiple ultraviolet sources irradiate this matrix. The effect is to increase the density of the UV field while entrapping and killing microbes in the matrix. Because of this novel design, the T1 system can inactivate airborne microbes at much higher airflow rates and with greater efficiency than other technologies.
The T1 system also has applications in laboratory, commercial and biodefense environments.
