FIGURE 2 Detailed schematic presentation of the heater.
In the control experiment, the heater was off, the compressor and the nebulizer were on for five minutes. The control experiments were repeated twice. In the test experiments, the heater’s outlet temperature was set to 150±5oC and 220±5oC. This was accomplished by varying the current through the electric heating coil. The air flow rate was set to 0.6 m3/h in all the experiments. In the test experiments, the compressor and the heater were turned on, and then the outlet air temperature was set to one of the above temperatures. Then, the nebulizer was turned on. After five minutes, the nebulizer was turned off, then the heater and the compressor were turned off. After the experiments, the gelatin filter inside the inline polycarbonate filter holder was dissolved in distilled water to harvest the virus.
3 | RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The viral presence of the stock virus was 7.5 log10TCID50. The control experiments were performed twice, and the average viral load was 5.5 log10TCID50. In setting the heater outlet air temperature to 150±5oC, the viral load was reduced to 2.5 log10TCID50. The reduction in the viability of the virus is 3 log10 or 99.9%. At the higher temperature of 220±5oC, the virus load viability was 0.5 log10TCID50, reducing the infectivity of the virus to 5 log10 or 99.999%.
Table 1 log10 TCID50 values of the stock virus, control, and test groups.