Vejleder: Beate Klösgen
Projektbeskrivelse
The current pandemic situation has attracted new interest to need of surface cleaning and the importance of quality control of cleaning procedures. With a crowded population in cities and many related inter-human contact points the demand for clean conditions is a basic hygiene request for supplies and goods, and in shared facilities as surfaces in restaurants, public toilets, schools, shops, transportation units for the public and, of course, in health institutions.
The performance of a commercially available cleaning agent shall be studied by a statistical assessment under defined conditions. Especially, the testing of the product reliability for the removal of bacteria and viruses will be in focus.
The bachelor (or master) project involves a study that explores the efficiency of a cleaning agent on selected surfaces in terms of absence / suppression of bacterial growth.
Especially, the project demands for the development of a protocol for the assessment under standardized well described conditions. Test surfaces (seats, tables, …) must be identified, and the status of comparable surfaces must be assessed before and after (subsequent) cleaning steps, in a representative and reproducible way. The aptitude of bacterial occupation / residence will be quantified by use of an ATP-sensor and accomplished, for selected cases, by use of test Petri-dishes and microscopic evaluation. The demand for similar testing procedures on virus presence will be explored. The project involves experimental work and basic statistical evaluation. The student will learn to establish a testing protocol, conduct systematic studies based on it, document the results and analyse them with the goal of procedure / product benchmarking. The results shall be assembled and discussed, to be filed into a thesis text.