Affiliations: [a] Department of Information and Electronic Engineering, Muroran Institute of Technology, Mizumoto-cho, Muroran, Japan | [b] Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Hideki Kawaguchi, Department of Information and Electronic Engineering, Muroran Institute of Technology, Mizumoto-cho, 27-1, 050-8585, Muroran, Japan. E-mail:kawa@mmm.muroran-it.ac.jp
Abstract: Beyond on remarkable progresses in a technology of high-voltage pulse, it is
considered to apply the high-voltage pulsed electric field to an
inactivation of a microorganism. In particular, the method of the
high-voltage pulse has advantage in the inactivation of bacteria in foods,
since conventional methods such as heat disinfectant, X-ray or gamma-ray are
expected to induce negative secondary effects, changes of flavor, taste,
texture of the foods, and so on. In the treatment of the microorganism by
the high-voltage pulse, the microorganism is destroyed by pure mechanical
stress force created by externally applied electric field, and therefore
there are no negative secondary effects. However, it should be carefully
evaluated how much strong stress force can be produced by reasonable voltage
and pulse duration of the high-voltage pulse for the inactivation of the
microorganism. Then, evaluation of the stress force for cases of complete
sphere and axis-symmetric shapes of the microorganism were presented by
using an analytical formula or 2-D FEM. In this paper, an electrostatic
field analysis by using 3-D BEM with a thin layer approximation for a
membrane of the microorganism is presented to aim to evaluate the stress
force for arbitrary shape microorganism.
Keywords: High-voltage pulsed electric field, electrostatic field analysis, finite difference method, boundary element method, Maxwell's stress
