Kh. Schoenbach et al., THE EFFECT OF PULSED ELECTRIC-FIELDS ON BIOLOGICAL CELLS - EXPERIMENTS AND APPLICATIONS, IEEE transactions on plasma science, 25(2), 1997, pp. 284-292
The effect of pulsed electric fields with amplitudes in the range of 1
00 V/cm-100 kV/cm on bacteria and aquatic nuisance species has been ex
plored, The pulse duration was so short that heating of the biological
matter could be neglected, The electrical energy required for lysing
of bacteria, or stunning of aquatic species, decreases when the pulse
duration is reduced, For lysing of Eschericia call, this tendency has
been proven to hold for pulsewidths as short as 60 ns, For macroorgani
sms, however, it was found that for pulsewidths of less than 5 mu s, t
he tendency is reversed: the energy required to affect the macroorgani
sms increases again, This minimum in energy, or maximum in efficiency,
respectively, can be understood by taking the time required for elect
rical charging of the cell membrane into account, Applications of the
pulsed electric field technique (PEFT) are in biofouling prevention, d
ebacterialization of liquids, and in the field of medicine. A series o
f field tests on biofouling prevention in a cooling system with untrea
ted water as coolant has demonstrated the economic feasibility of the
electrotechnology.