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05-20
01:29
| Symbol | Last | Change | Opening |
|---|---|---|---|
| 000001.SS | 2,470.02 | 1.77 (0.07%) | 2,450.33 |
21 °C01:29
| Symbol | Last | Change | Opening |
|---|---|---|---|
| 000001.SS | 2,470.02 | 1.77 (0.07%) | 2,450.33 |
A very diverse range of medical devices are today sterilized using E-beam processing. The selection between E-beam and X-ray as your sterilization technology will depend on two key criterias: product density and product packaging. Low and medium density products packaged in cardboard boxes are ideally treated with E-beam. X-rays are a viable alternative to radioactive gamma-ray sources for sterilization of high density products or products packaged on pallets.
Low and Medium Density Products Packaged in Boxes
Many packaged medical devices have a low bulk density: electron penetration is therefore appropriate. If need be, packages can be irradiated from two sides, thereby increasing the beam penetration. The success encountered by E-beam over the past years is due to the very competitive sterilization price per unit. E-beam also answers to an industry key concern which is to sterilize without using chemical poisons and without dangerous radioactive sources.
Combining high-power and high energy, IBA's Rhodotron is unique amongst E-beam accelerators. The Rhodotron is available in a wide range of power levels. The Rhodotron can provide one or several beam outputs from 2 to 10 MeV and power ranging from 35kW to 700 kW. IBA also provides a team of sterilization system experts so as to help you find your way in the Sterilization options.
Medium and High Density Products Packaged on Pallets
When products are too dense for E-beam, or if medical devices are packaged on pallets, X-ray Sterilization is the solution. Much more penetrating than E-beam, X-ray is very similar to Gamma rays generated from Cobalt with the key difference that X-ray´s are powered by electricity. This allows medical devices to be sterilized on their original packaging pallets.
eXelis® Sterilization is the X-ray Sterilization solution for Medical devices. X-ray sterilization with eXelis is the ideal alternative to Gamma for Medical Device Manufacturers. X-rays offer better dose uniformity, faster product turn-over time and do not require complex transport management of radio active sources.
The Reference of Electron Beam Accelerators
The strengths of the Dynamitron® are its ruggedness & reliability together with its adaptability.
Operating conditions, such as electron energy, beam power, conveyor speed and dose, can all be changed quickly for different applications.
The adaptability of the Dynamitron® makes it the perfect solution for both flexible, multi-product processing environments and for specialized applications.
It is powerful and tunable in energy for applications such as crosslinking, and extremely accurate and tunable in current for applications such as silicon wafer processing.
| 550 kV | 70/100/160 mA |
| 800 kV | 70/100/160 mA |
| 1000 kV | 60/100 mA |
| 1500 kV | 40/65mA |
| 3000 kV | 50/75 mA |
| 5000 kV | 30/50 mA |
Accelerators, such as the Dynamitron®, work on the same principle as a television tube. Electrons are generated by a heated filament which forms the electron gun. A voltage gradient draws the electrons away from the gun and accelerates them through the vacuum tube. As the high voltage beam of electrons passes from the beam tube and through the scan magnet, an oscillating magnetic field sweeps the beam back and forth across the scan window.
A television operates at about 25 kV, which is enough to generate images from the electrons striking the fluorescent screen of the picture tube. The voltage of the Dynamitron®, however, ranges from 500kV to 5 MeV which is high enough to accelerate the electrons through the metal foil of the scan window and irradiate product passing beneath. Electrons accelerated under a voltage of 5 MeV are traveling at approximately 99.6% of the speed of light, or nearly 300,000 km/sec, when they enter the scan window.
Beam current is an indication of the number of electrons being accelerated. In a television set, beam current is in the order of several microamps. In a Dynamitron®, the beam current is a thousand times higher. It is interesting to note that 1 mA of beam current represents about 6 million billion electron particles every second.
Where the objective of a television is to create a picture, a Dynamitron® bundles electrons into a 3 to 5 cm diameter beam to irradiate industrial products. The enormous number of electrons and the high acceleration voltage produces rapid reactions by operating directly on the molecules within the product. This produces an efficiency that is outstanding when compared to other methods such as heat, light, and chemical reagents.
Sterilization of Medical Devices
Cable and Wire crosslinking
Heat Shrinkable Products
Food, Sanitary and Phytosanitary
Surface decontamination
Petroleum upgrading
Solar
Composite Curing
Environment and waste
Glass and gemstone
Tires
The Rhodotron is in commercial use since the late 1990’s and has proven its very high uptime. Its advanced control system includes not only extended troubleshooting possibilities and a remote access but also a customized maintenance planning.
The Rhodotron is the only machine able to combine High Energy and very High Power. Flexibility is also one of its key words since Multiple Beamlines make possible the use of the same Rhodotron for both E-Beam and X-ray.
The IBA Rhodotron is available in several configurations.
The new Rhodotron® TT100 is a very cost effective E-beam solution ideally suited for customers with medium production volumes. The TT100 delivers up to 45kW giving customers the possibility to build medium throughput sterilization facilities processing an average of 80 000 m³ of sterilized medical devices per year.
The Rhodotron TT200 is the typical solution for medium to large E-Beam sterilization centers. With 80kW of power, the average yearly throughput of Sterilized Medical Devices is 135.000 m³. The TT200 can also be upgraded to the TT300 allowing you to meet your future growth requirements.
The Rhodotron TT300 is suited for very large sterilization centers handling up to 250.000 m³ of sterilized medical devices per year.
These very high power Rhodotrons (respectively 290 kW and 700kW) are specifically designed for X-Ray treatment.
The Rhodtron® can be supplied with numerous configurations each having a specific use or advantage linked to a customer's request or needs. A non exhaustive list of these possible options can be found below.
Multiple energies
Multiple beam lines rated at different energies can be extracted from a single RhodotronR. IBA Industrial has already fitted up to 3 different beam lines / energies on to one single Rhodotron®.
270° bending magnet
The 270° bending magnet bends the beam by 90° (down or up) in order to allow vertical beam irradiation on the conveyor while the Rhodtron® can be placed at another level. Only the Rhodtron® has the capability of properly bending its beam thanks to its very low beam energy spread (compared to DC accelerators).
Pseudo parallel beam
The Rhodotron® can be supplied with a scan horn system that delivers a scanned but non-diverging (parallel ray) beam.
Offset beam
The Rhodotron® can be supplied with an adjustable off-set of the center of the scan. For certain facility configurations using a horizontal beam to irradiate products passing beside (not under) the beam, this is a major advantage. When processing horizontally, the base of the product carrier is usually fixed, and thus to treat products in that position on the carrier, the beam has to be scanned at the maximum setting. If the full height of the carrier is not used, then empty space has to be irradiated. By reducing the scan setting and then off-setting the center of the scan downwards, there is no need to waste beam in empty space.
X-Ray target
Tantalum X-Ray targets can be adapted to the scanning horns. These are supplied with a specific cooling device and are designed in compliance with the working conditions linked to the customer's specific application.
Rhodotron cavities are shaped as a coaxial line shortened at both ends and resonating at 107.5 MHz or 215 MHz. The beam crosses the cavity in the median plane through successive diameters. External window-frame magnets are used to bend back the electrons emerging from the cavity and to redirect them toward the cavity centre.
A high power RF system using a tetrode produces the electric field allowing an energy gain of 0.833 or 1 MeV per crossing. Ten or twelve crossings of the cavity (which means nine or eleven bending magnets) are required in order to obtain 10 MeV electron beams.
The cavity diameters of both the TT200 and TT300 is 2 meters. In these conditions, energy gain is 1 MeV per crossing. In these Rhodotron models, five and ten successive crossings are therefore needed to obtain respectively 5 and 10 MeV at the exit of the Rhodotron. A smaller cavity (diameter of 1 meter) was selected for the TT100 Rhodotron 10 MeV / 35 kW guaranteed power in order to have a very compact design. Energy gain of the TT100 is 833 keV per crossing. Therefore, 12 crossings are necessary to reach 10 MeV at the exit of this accelerator.
The electron gun is located at the outer wall of the accelerating cavity. In order to match the RF frequency (the electrons have to be injected into the cavity when the field is accelerating), the gun is pulsed at the RF frequency and the pulse width is equal to 60° of the RF period. Electrons are injected into the cavity at a voltage of about 35 - 40 kV. The use of the grid allows to modulate the emitted current.
The RF system consists of a voltage controlled oscillator followed by a chain of amplifiers.
The role of the deflection magnets is multiple: first, they are needed to send the electrons back into the cavity after each diameter crossing in order for them to undergo another accelerating cycle. The magnets also contribute to the focusing of the beam. It is possible to position a straight beam exit at each port, i.e. at energies of 1 to 10 MeV, in steps of 1 MeV.
Sterilization of Medical Devices
Cable and Wire crosslinking
Heat Shrinkable Products
Food, Sanitary and Phytosanitary
Surface decontamination
Petroleum upgrading
Solar
Composite Curing
Environment and waste
Glass and gemstone
Tires
There are two fundamental properties of all electron beam accelerators: the electron energy and the beam current. Since electrons have mass and electrical charge, their penetration into materials is limited by their energy and by the mass and density of the target material.
The intensity or degree of exposure to electrons is called the absorbed dose, which is characterized in the System International (SI) as the gray or as commonly used in industrial processing, the kilogray (kGy) where 1 kGy = 1 J/g absorbed energy per mass.
Over the decades of industrial use, key market segments such as Surface Curing, Shrink Film, Wire & Cable and Sterilization have found reliable industrial accelerators suited for their requirements.
Given an overlap of tail ends of the depth-dose penetration, two sided electron beam exposure results in an effective 2.4 multiple of the Electron Beam penetration itself. Thus, fairly large, low bulk density packages can be irradiated if the item is turned over during processing.
High beam current is what distinguishes industrial electron beam accelerators from equipment that is commonly used solely for research purposes. Most industrial accelerators have beam currents in the tens of milliampere range (>10 mA). High beam currents are required in industry because product through-put rates are proportional to beam current.
Since material through-put is dependent upon beam current and beam power, one can see why industry prefers to use high beam current and high power accelerators. High beam currents also imply very high dose rates. Industrial electron beam dose rates are in the order of 100 kGy/second or 360,000 kGy/hour. This is five orders of magnitude greater than the dose rates from cobalt-60 gamma-ray sources, which are ~10 kGy/hour or 2.8 × 10-3 kGy/second.
The development of high-energy electron accelerators with very high-power electron beams has made X-ray processing a practical alternative to gamma-ray processing for applications, such as the sterilization of packaged medical devices and the preservation of foods, which require greater penetration than can be provided by energetic electron beams. The feasibility of radiation processing with high-energy X-rays has been demonstrated in various industrial facilities in several countries.
Recent comparisons have shown that the capital costs and electric power costs for accelerators with electron energies of 5.0 MeV to 7.0 MeV can be lower than the capital costs and source replenishment costs for cobalt-60 source loadings greater than 2.0 MCi. The capability to turn the radiation source on and off and to control the X-ray intensity are attractive features of an accelerator facility.
When an accelerated electron impinges upon any material it generates X-radiation or X-rays. Characteristic mono-energetic X-ray photons are produced by the electron interaction with orbital electrons; bremsstrahlung photons are produced by the interaction with the nucleus of an atom. High energy bremsstrahlung X-rays are a penetrating form of ionizing radiation. Such X-ray intensities from high power, high energy industrial X-ray generators exceed by far those of common medical X-ray equipment.
X-rays are produced by interposing a metal target between the electron beam and the product to be treated. To enhance electron-to-photon conversion, these X-ray targets are made of high atomic number (high Z) metals. Water cooled tantalum is preferred for large area targets.
X-radiation has a forward peaked emission and the rate at which a material receives X-radiation photons, the dose-rate, can be controlled by a combination of the distance from the target, the beam current and under-beam transport speed.
The forward peaked emission of X-rays is significantly different from the panoramic emission of gamma-ray sources. This property facilitates the treatment of single pallet loads of product. X-ray penetration is much greater than E-Beam systems and is even better than gamma ray penetration. X-ray dose-rates are at least one order of magnitude higher than gamma rays, but significantly less than EB.
The advantages of X-ray processing for industrial applications are thus:
•Controllable dose-rates, which can facilitate monomer polymerization.
•Not a thermal process, which eliminates adverse effects on materials due to heat.
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