What Is Ethylene Oxide Gas And Why Shall We Use Ethylene Oxide Sterilization?
Publish Time：2023-10-12
Ethylene oxide is a gas that is used to sterilize products, it's colorless and odorless at lower concentrations, but when you get up to very high concentrations, it does have a slight smell. it's a gas at room temperature, so the sterilizers take the gas from a liquid, we run it through a vaporizer just to make sure that it does completely convert to gas so you're not adding liquid ethylene oxide into the chamber.
Eo gas has some safety concerns not only is toxic and mutagenic which is bad for people working with it but it's good for its use as a sterilent. Ethylene oxide gas is very effective at sterilizing microorganisms
There is around 52 billion pounds of ethylene oxide are produced every year, but only a small percentage of that is used for sterilization, only about 1% of EO produced is used for sterilization, and 99% of it is used for other industrial chemicals.
About 50% of the market industrially is used for ethylene oxide to sterilize by eto gas, very little on a large scale is done with steam or other things like vaporized hydrogen peroxide.
EO sterilization is one of the most complex types of sterilization
temperature, humidity, gas concentration, and the exposure time, we have to do a lot of monitoring with these cycles
most contract sterilization cycles are usually controlled at 45 to 55 degrees, you rarely see anything go above 55 degrees, which is about 100- and 30 degrees Fahrenheit
And it was low-temperature sterilization for a lot of the plastics and components that either would melt if they steam sterilized it or if you use radiation there might be some kind of issues with the polymers.