AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Wind Tunnel Detachment of Bacillus Thruingiensis Spores
JING QIAN, Meilu He, Babak Nasr, Minyard Morgan, Andrea R. Ferro, Goodarz Ahmadi, Suresh Dhaniyala, Clarkson University
Abstract Number: 470 Working Group: Environmental Fate of Infectious Aerosols
Abstract The resuspension of Bacillus anthracis in outdoor environments is of particular concern because of its pathogenicity and potential for use as a biological weapon. However, quantitative understanding of the resuspension mechanism for bacterial spores is lacking, which deters us from modeling real-world outdoor biological particle resuspension processes.This study concludes the initial experimental stage of a research project that investigates spore resuspension under various environmental conditions. Bacillus thuringiensis, a nonpathogenic surrogate for Bacillus anthracis, were deposited on various substrates and then resuspended in a high-speed wind tunnel operated with varying humidity conditions. The detachment of particles was determined as a function of shear velocity for each set of conditions. The study verifies a series of instrumentation and experimental methods for the deposition, resuspension, and analysis of biological particles. The experiments provide critical data to estimate particle adhesion parameters necessary to predict the resuspension fate of spores from real-world substrates under conditions of variable air flow velocity and humidity.This presentation will describe the experimental methodology for the resuspension studies and the major results obtained from our experiments.