Reusable medical fabrics are desirable to alleviate single-use masks shortages, especially in this COVID pandemic. However, the difficulty of rapid disinfection has restricted use to disposable (rather than reusable) surgical masks and respirators to a large degree. In this paper, we introduce RF heating to conductive textiles, which offers the benefits of the reusable PPE by pathogen inactivation. RF field was applied to rapidly heat textile coated with conductive polymer blends with different conductivities (PEDOT:PSS, PEDOT:PSS/PEG, PEDOT:PSS/GOPS, PEDOT:PSS/PVP). The result shows that PEDOT:PSS coated textile and PEDOT:PSS/GOPS coated textile showed rapid heating with heating temperature ~100 °C and ~65 °C at 1W. PEDOT:PSS and PEDOT:PSS/GOPS coated textile showed good wash durability on RF heating, which makes a good candidate for the multiple uses of PPE. Rapid bacteria and virus inactivation were achieved with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV). The MRSA was reduced 99.9% after 10 minutes and HCMV was sterilized after 5 min after the RF exposure on conductive textile. This study provides future opportunities for reusable PPE, where PPE can be used multiple times after easy sterilization via RF heating and washing.

Radio-frequency (RF) heating on washable conductive textiles and its application in bacteria and virus inactivation

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