AAAR 37th Annual Conference October 14 - October 18, 2019 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Efficiency Examination of a Pilot Scale Packed-bed Non-thermal Plasma (NTP) Reactor in Inactivating Airborne Viruses Emitted from a Pig Barn on a Michigan Farm
TIAN XIA, Zijie Lin, Eric Lee, Kevin Melotti, Mitchell Rohde, Herek Clack, University of Michigan
Abstract Number: 831 Working Group: Bioaerosols
Abstract Airborne transmission of livestock diseases or zoonotic disease greatly threaten global food security, agricultural industry and public health. In pork industry, porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) is one of the most significant diseases which can be transmitted through air and caused US farmers $664 million loss annually. Applying HEPA filtration, the traditional bioaerosol control technology, to ventilation air supplied to pig barns involves structural retrofits to buildings that can be costly, in addition to the periodic replacement of used filters. Non-thermal plasmas (NTPs), on the other hand, can inactivate airborne viruses and bacteria with minimal pressure drop. Our previous experiments using a lab-scale packed bed non-thermal plasma reactor demonstrated effective inactivation of bacteriophage MS2 and PRRS virus as a function of applied voltage and power. In the present study, a pilot scale prototype packed-bed NTP reactor was constructed (by Quantum Signal LLC, Saline MI) and installed at one manure pit exhaust of a pig barn on a local Michigan farm, and its PRRS virus inactivation efficiency was tested on-site. Experiments were conducted about seven days after vaccination, when the PRRS virus shedding rate was likely to be the highest. Two impingers and/or two button samplers sampled the virus-loaded air flow at both upstream and downstream positions of the reactor. Subsequent TCID50 assay and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) analyses of the collected samples determined the pre- and post-treatment abundance of infective PRRSv (in TCID50/ml) as compared with the abundance of the total viral genome (qPCR). In addition to PRRS virus inactivation, the study also examined the impact of ambient relative humidity on the discharge behavior within the NTP reactor and demonstrated challenges and failures a bioaerosol researcher may encounter when collecting ambient samples on a pig farm.