Electric Field Modelling of Microbila Inactivation

I think 'Electro-magnetic-theory' subject will help you.

This review article described here on PEF design for food preservation might be helpful. If not, see the list of related articles which is linked on the right hand side. You really want to read all of these (and/or more) if you're going to be doing research on this subject, as the design considerations are the same as apply to yours.

In fact, here's another article on a PEF simulation in free pdf. Electric field boundary conditions are discussed and defined on page three.

thanx for reply.. i read almost all of those... infact in my case i m taking a test chamber consisting of high voltage and ground electrode,n test chamber contains deionized water,i m applying 32Kv/cm impulse for bacteria lysing and using some software for its modelling.. but i dont knw exactly how to model these parameters,i mean how boundary values could differ in my case...

have any one idea:(

I can tell you one thing, reaching 30kV/cm requires thoroughly deionized water, because otherwise the current will be excessively high. You may have a power supply that can deliver such a high current, but 30kV * high current = high power, so watch out. In experiments in my lab with a 20kV power supply, I see currents of about 2mA with well deionized water (that's 40 watts), but any tiny contamination pushes the current up to the power supply's 10mA limit, or 200 watts. At that power level the water is heating rapidly, up to 100C as measured remotely with a FLIR imager, and in fact some boiling takes place.

So I question the practical viability of using high electric fields for bacteria lysing. It assumes bacteria located in extremely thoroughly processed deionized water, how likely is that? I suppose it's possible to setup as an experiment (carefully adding some bacteria and nothing else to deionized water), but how can it be a real-world situation?

As for modeling ions in an electric-field, how about Simion?

thanx for a comprehensive reply...

actually i am adding bacteria in deionized water,otherwise water has a very high conductivity. You are right simion might be helpful in this regard.

infact i want it practical application so applied this scheme directly to contaminated water. I mean by taking a considerable amount of contaminted water in a test chamber,containing high voltage and ground electrode of a specific configuration and reduced water conductivity by adding some amount of resin upto 1S/m.. by applying impulse votage of 6KV,and time duration of 0.63msec and no of pulses varied from 10 to 150 pulses with step of 10 pulses but i got only 30% lysing,i dont know what exactly could be the matter that it didnt lysed effectively.