ABSTRACT
Beyond an exceptional human toll, one of the most evident impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is that of disrupted supply chain dynamics. Lessons learned here might help ameliorate the ability of frontline workers to secure personal protective equipment (PPE) such as N95 filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs) to prevent similar issues in future pandemics. A related concern is FFR waste streams, and the ability to recycle N95s using chemical or physical germicidal methods would greatly contribute to lessening PPE scarcity and providing relief to overall supply chains for all essential services. Early in 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued official guidance for sterilizers, disinfectant devices, and air purifiers with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic as a public health emergency bulletin. This guidance provided nonbinding recommendations for PPE and FFR decontamination processes, involving a wide spectrum of chemical and physical methods of sterilization. Many of the sterilization methods employ high heat or utilize polar chemical disinfectants that can compromise either the physical structure or the electrostatic properties of FFR fibers, thus attenuating the overall protection provided to the frontline worker. Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) has been employed for nearly a century to sterilize instruments and whole environments. UVGI offers numerous advantages as it is transitory by nature, leaving no chemical residue on the treated artifact. UVGI is also rapid, and depending on illumination sources, UVGI can easily scale to provide coverage to large areas. Here we provide an analysis of the regulatory aspect related to the use of UVC devices and describe our engineered design of a cost-efficient sterilization chamber that utilizes UVC for decontamination. Our design stresses a low-cost price point to facilitate easy manufacture for not only rapid deployment but also minimal impacts on supply chains. The device is intended to be easy to use, without any specialized training, and thus targets the general public for sanitizing non-washable materials, including PPE, FFR and other potential fomites, including electronic devices of daily use, that otherwise might harbor bacterial, viral and fungal pathogens. Copyright © 2022 by ASME.