Liquid Hydrogen Peroxide Generator System

Industrial room-size vaporized hydrogen peroxide (VHP) sterilization devices are available for low temperature sterilization such as commercial units provided by Steris, Bioquell, and Battelle. These systems use a disposable cartridge containing 35%-59% (wt) liquid H2O2 that is punctured when activated to release and vaporize hydrogen peroxide. Vaporized hydrogen peroxide offers several appealing features for sterilization that include rapid cycle time (e.g., 30-45 minutes), low temperature processing in the range of 20-40 °C, environmentally safe by-products of H2O and O2, and good material compatibility. One method for delivering VHP to the process chamber is to pull a deep vacuum to 1-3 Torr that extracts liquid hydrogen peroxide from its canister through a heated cartridge into the sterilization chamber. Another method is to vaporize the hydrogen peroxide and use a carrier gas such as air to deliver the VHP to the sterilization chamber. However, the present VHP systems are problematic in that they require EPA regulated and controlled concentrated H2O2 canisters for each activation. This gets to be expensive and wasteful especially since H2O2 decomposes relatively fast giving the canisters a short shelf life. Furthermore, supplying these concentrated H2O2 canisters complicates logistics making the use of these large scale VHP sterilizer units problematic for military operations. One manner to overcome these difficulties with using concentrated H2O2 canisters is to generate liquid H2O2 on-site as it gets fed to the large size vaporized hydrogen peroxide sterilizer units. This Phase I proposal will produce such a liquid H2O2 generator system that only requires air, water, and electrical energy.