Comparing Bactericidal Effect of Pulsed Flash Lamp and Continuous Sterilization UV Lamps with a Cold Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Jet on E. Coli Solid Growth Medium

Pulsed UV sterilizer lamps and cold atmospheric pressure plasma are the newest technologies that have been proposed as feasible alternatives in the traditional sterilization method. The main objective of this project was to compare the sterilization effect of these two technologies (Pulsed UV lamps and cold atmospheric pressure plasma) with continuous UV lamps on Escherichia coli bacteria. Although Continuous UV lamps are widely used in different organizations such as hospitals for sterilization, they take hours to sterilize the medium. There are methods that can effectively decay the bacteria surface in a few minutes; it is called cold atmospheric plasma jet. Since sterilization has gained lots of attention, many researches are performing by other methods. This project releases how atmospheric plasma can strongly influence better on decaying Escherichia coli bacteria compared to two other techniques; Xenon arc lamp, continuous UV lamp. The results suggested that the xenon pulsed flash lamps with Pyrex envelope have the ability to sterilize the surface of the bacterium with at least 80 pulses. The results of atmospheric plasma flow on the bacterial surface have been proved that the reactive species (OH radicals, charged particles, NO, ozone, O3, in the plasma jet caused a significant decline in the colony numbers; after 6 minutes treatment by plasma jet, there was a great reduction in the number of colonies up to zero. Also, the effect of the commercial continuous UV sterilizer lamp was used and its sterilization results were compared to pulsed flash lamps and cold atmospheric plasma. These results demonstrate that pulsed light treatment can be effective on destroying Escherichia coli bacteria due to its high energy and short operating time.