The Covid-19 pandemic brought new challenges to society. New daily necessities—like disinfectant—quickly ran out, and prices skyrocketed. At the University of Malta, researchers are developing a way to quickly and affordably produce disinfectant. Their goal is to create a setup that allows disinfectants to be produced in health care facilities, becoming independent of supply chains and private producers.
This technology is being developed conjunctively between the Department of Food Safety & Nutrition and the Metamaterials Unit of the University of Malta. To create disinfectant, the researchers are using plasma, the fourth state of matter. Plasma delivers high amounts of energy, which allows water particles to create new molecules. This sort of ‘plasma ray’ is highly versatile — it can produce various solutions if researchers join the right ingredients.
Dr Jefferson de Oliveira Mallia (Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Malta) was in charge of finding the ingredients to blast the plasma at and create the desired solutions. Dr Sholeem Griffin (Centre for Biomedical Cybernetics, University of Malta) is now testing the safety and efficacy of the resulting solutions.
The ingenious invention is a product of the work of Prof. Vasilis Valdramidis (Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Malta), Prof. Ruben Gatt (Metamaterials Unit at the Faculty of Science, University of Malta), and Dr Dmytro Kozak (Division BioTeC+, Department of Chemical Engineering at KU Leuven, Belgium).
For more details on the plasma technology and its future applications, you can read the full article in issue 36 of THINK Magazine, or access it online. This edition focuses on Destruction and tackles topics ranging from death to war to environmental devastation.
