DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-POWERED HUMAN-SAFE LIGHT-BASED SANITIZERS TO ENHANCE FOOD SAFETY

Professor Wang’s project addresses the pressing issue of food safety in the United States by developing a novel, cost-effective, and human-safe method for decontaminating food. Currently, foodborne illnesses affect millions of Americans and cost the country billions of dollars annually. But existing food-decontamination techniques have various drawbacks: notably, adverse effects on food quality, high operating and equipment costs, and/or high energy consumption. More importantly, most such methods are applied during the processing stage, even though contamination could happen at any time. Therefore, Professor Wang and his team will develop low-cost, easy-to-use sanitizers, relying on human-safe far-ultraviolet C (far-UVC) light. Unlike conventional UVC light, which can lead to eye injuries and skin damage and is produced by lamps containing toxic mercury, far-UVC is human-safe, yet still effective at inactivating bacteria. And just as importantly, from a sustainability viewpoint, Wang’s team will integrate their far-UVC lamps with triboelectric devices, which can convert otherwise-wasted mechanical energy into electricity.

Due to the “self-powered” character that triboelectricity endows it with, the resulting sanitizer has the potential to deliver continuous decontamination, not only in processing facilities, but also throughout supply chains, as well as in low-resource settings of all kinds, e.g., disaster-relief efforts and military deployments.

This project’s findings could also be important beyond the realm of food safety—for instance, in chemical detoxification. Ultimately, the outcomes of this research could contribute to building a safer, more sustainable, and more resilient food system, and further benefit the American people by increasing the availability, affordability, and accessibility of safe and nutritious food.