Characterization of the flowing afterglows of an N2-O2 reduced-pressure discharge: setting the operating conditions to achieve a dominant late afterglow and correlating the NObeta UV intensity variation with the N and O atom densities

The flowing afterglow of an N2-O2 discharge in the 0.6-10 Torr range is examined in the perspective of achieving sterilization of medical devices (MDs) under conditions ensuring maximum UV intensity with minimum damage to polymer-based MDs. The early afterglow is shown to be responsible for creating strong erosion damage, requiring that the sterilizer be operated in a dominant late-afterglow mode. These two types of afterglow can be characterized by optical emission spectroscopy: the early afterglow is distinguished by an intense emission from the 1st negative system (band head at 391.4 nm) while the late afterglow yields an overpopulation of the v' = 11 ro-vibrational level of the N2(B) state, indicating a reduced contribution from the early afterglow N2 metastable species. We have studied the influence of operating conditions (pressure, O2 content in the N2-O2 mixture, distance of the discharge from the entrance to the afterglow (sterilizer) chamber) in order to achieve a dominant late afterglow that also ensures maximum and almost uniform UV intensity in the sterilization chamber. As far as operating conditions are concerned, moving the plasma source sufficiently far from the chamber entrance is shown to be a practical means for significantly reducing the density of the characteristic species of the early afterglow.