Yujie Meng, Rae Zeng, Kurt Rubin, Kelly Barry
KLA Corporation, 205 Perimeter Park, Suite C, Knoxville, TN 37922 USA.
1 Technology Drive, Milpitas, CA 95035 USA.
MRS Adv. 2020;5(56):2863-2872. doi: 10.1557/adv.2020.347. Epub 2020 Dec 1.
Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) N95 filtering facepiece respirator (FFR) treatment is considered an effective decontamination approach to address the supply shortage of N95 FFRs during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. In this study, we investigated the nanomechanical and topographic properties of filtration fibers that have been exposed to different doses of UVC radiation. UVC exposure was shown to decrease both Young's modulus (E), hardness (H) and fiber width, as measured on individual polypropylene (PP) fibers. Our results also show that the PP microfiber layer loses its strength when N95 respirators are exposed to an accumulated UVC dose during the process of decontamination, and the PP fiber width also exhibits a logarithmic decrease during UVC exposure. The nanoscale measurement results on individual fibers suggest that maximum cycles of UVC disinfection treatment should be limited due to excessive accumulated dose, which has the potential to decrease the fiber breaking strength.
在当前新冠疫情期间，紫外线杀菌辐照（UVGI）N95过滤式面罩呼吸器（FFR）处理被认为是一种有效的去污方法，可解决N95 FFR供应短缺问题。在本研究中，我们调查了暴露于不同剂量紫外线C（UVC）辐射的过滤纤维的纳米力学和形貌特性。在单根聚丙烯（PP）纤维上测量发现，UVC照射会降低杨氏模量（E）、硬度（H）以及纤维宽度。我们的结果还表明，在去污过程中，当N95呼吸器暴露于累积的UVC剂量时，PP超细纤维层会失去强度，并且在UVC照射期间PP纤维宽度也呈对数下降。单根纤维的纳米级测量结果表明，由于累积剂量过大，UVC消毒处理的最大循环次数应受到限制，这有可能降低纤维的断裂强度。
