"New Company Uses Plasma for Decontamination"
Maryville Daily Times
September 21,2000
by Iva Butler
Atmospheric Glow Technologies, a company dedicated to cleaning and sterilizing air and products, has opened in Stock Creek Development Center at Rockford.
The high-tech firm is involved in developing atmospheric plasma which is used in the decontamination/cleaning process, said Dr. Kimberly Kelly-Wintenberg, president and CEO.
An open house will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. Friday at the company, which is located at 2340 Stock Creek Boulevard, Rockford.
At the open house, company officials are scheduled to sign a partnership with the Tennessee Center for Research and Development, which provided start-up funds and venture capital. The new company will also be licensing the technology from UT Research Corporation.
The four scientists working in this new business all come from UT. In fact, three consultants who own part of the company still work at UT, including Dr. Reece Roth, an electrical engineering professor and head of the UT Plasma Sciences Lab.
"Roth put together the team at UT and discovered how to make plasma using atmospheric pressure and air," said Daniel Sherman, vice president of research and business development of the new company.
"Plasma is the forth state of matter," he explained.
For example, ice is a solid that become liquid and then a gas when heated enough. When the gas is heated even more it becomes plasma.
"Plasma is just a very energetic gas," he said.
Atmospheric Glow hopes to branch into several avenues using this plasma. One is cleaning medical devices and instruments that cannot be sterilized by conventional methods, Kelly-Wintenberg said. Another use is cleaning and sterilizing indoor air. For example, machines can generate plasma and blow it across a filter, thus continually sterilizing the air.
"In the arena of textiles, if you expose plastics, films, polymers and fabrics to the plasma they can be made to (draw moisture quicker)," Kelly-Wintenberg said.
An example is wool, which becomes as comfortable as cotton when treated, Sherman said.
Other potential opportunities are the new Environmental Protection Agency mandates requiring cleaner air by reducing particulate compounds and volatile organic compounds from diesel engines, Kelly-Wintenberg said.
Diesel engines are dirty and cause filters to clog. With a plasma treatment the soot is oxidized away, which keeps the filter from clogging and assures cleaner air, she explained.
In the area of food processing, plasma can be used on produce, meats and seafood and in the food process to keep them clean and/or disinfected, she said.
For example, in the new market of bagged lettuce and salads, plasmas could kill bacterial organisms.
"The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has noticed increases in contamination of fresh produce and washing it off does not always reduce the disease-causing microorganisms. Typically the contamination comes from the pickers.
"Lettuce is a real challenge because a lot of the current methods cause it to wilt and be unusable," Kelly-Wintenberg said.
Another use for atmospheric plasma is the decontamination of military equipment and personnel, thereby reducing the threat of a biological or chemical warfare agent, she added.
A device can be located in the cockpit of an aircraft or inside a tank which produces plasma to decontaminate the vehicle. An example would be a jet that flew over a munitions site which had just been blown up. Any biological agents or chemicals that attached themselves to the plane and/or pilot would be neutralized by the plasma.
Currently bleach is the standard military protocol to combat biological agents or chemicals, which causes a problem with runoff because bleach eradicates vegetation.
In the long run it is cheaper to use the plasma rather than using the environmentally unfriendly bleach.
"The only thing needed to build the device is electrical power. No exotic acids or extra chemicals have to be put in the mix," Sherman said. "There are no hazardous byproducts."
The company has already won its first business innovation grant, a federal project to destroy biofilms-bacteria which create their own microcommunities in such items as catheters and dairy processing equipment.
These are impossible to eradicate with antibiotics because antibiotics will not penetrate the layers where the bacteria exists. Plasma can destroy these bacteria, Sherman said.