Using salty mist to disinfect rooms earns PNNL an award

A new way to disinfect entire rooms using a fine, salty mist has earned recognition for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The Federal Laboratory consortium has picked the commercialization of that technology and the laboratory’s system to prevent cybersecurity attacks for 2016 Excellence in Technology Transfer awards. The consortium is a nationwide network encouraging federal laboratories to transfer technologies developed with taxpayer money to commercial use.

The Department of Energy’s Richland lab has earned 83 of the technology transfer awards since the awards program began in 1984, more than any other national laboratory.

PNNL’s innovations have led to 99 spinoff companies that were operating when statistics were compiled through 2014. They include 71 companies in Washington employing 2,305 people.

The salt-based disinfecting system has its roots in the former Soviet Union.

PNNL developed a prototype of the technology through a former DOE program to help transition former weapons scientists there to other research work. The Richland laboratory then further developed the technology with support from the Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

The system turns a simple table salt solution into a fine mist that can disinfect a whole room, whether at a hospital, gym or school. It’s more effective, easier to apply and less expensive than other disinfectant systems, according to PNNL.

In tests the spray has killed at least 99.99 percent of microbes. Microbes include molds, viruses like Ebola and bacteria such as those that cause staph infections.

The Micro Aerosol Disinfecting System runs an electrical current through a salt solution to create molecules, ions and free radicals with exceptionally strong disinfecting properties. The substance then is turned into a micro aerosol mist that can be released into a room to disinfect the the air and every surface within minutes to a few hours.

Watertech Equipment and Sales of Mount Pleasant, S.C., picked the technology to commercialize after seeking a disinfectant technology, according to PNNL. It adapted the system into an easy-to-deploy product for use in hospitals, for mold remediation and for use in food processing industries.

The PNNL team honored with the award includes Evguenia Rainina, Ron Thomas and Derek Maughan.

A new company, Champion Technology, with offices in Richland and Santa Monica, Calif., was established to commercialize cybersecurity software named Champion, the focus of the second technology transfer award.

Champion is designed to use historical data and knowledge from human analysts to learn about the company it is protecting.

Now human analysts are assigned to keep an eye on massive amounts of network information, spending up to 40 percent of the day sifting through data.

Champion can watch data on a much larger scale, freeing up analysts for other work and generating reports of suspicious activity in near real time before harm is done, according to PNNL.

For instance, a system monitoring a retail company might observe that a data back-up account for a ventilation system is trying to access current sales information. It could report the unusual activity in time to thwart a hacker from accessing customers’ credit card information.

By changing the knowledge shared with Champion, it can be used for other tasks, such as analyzing financial service of health care data.

To get the software into the marketplace, PNNL collaborated with Early X, a nonprofit education foundation spun out of Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. A group of graduate students and business executives identified market opportunities for the software, which laid the groundwork for the formation of Champion Technology Co.

The team receiving the technology transfer award includes PNNL’s Shawn Hampton and Kannan Krishnaswami; Champion Technology Co.’s Ryan Hohimer, formerly PNNL’s lead investigator on the project; and former PNNL staff members John McEntire, Frank Greitzer and Matthew Love.

This story was originally published February 10, 2016 at 4:28 PM with the headline "Using salty mist to disinfect rooms earns PNNL an award."