The controlling and terminating of airborne biological pollutants arouse people's attention in recent two years because of the epidemics of novel corona virus (COVID-19) in 2019 around the world. Therefore, an effective and environment-friendly control technique for bioaerosol is required to reduce the transmission and harm of infectious diseases and to decontaminate the indoor air effectively. According to the field literature, much effort has devoted to develop the active control technologies for airborne bacteria, including ultraviolet irradiation(Y. Yang et al. 2018), static electricity, microwave(Wu and Yao 2010), plasma(Bahri and Haghighat 2014), ozone, gas fumigation, lysozyme, photocatalysis (Lee 2016), air bactericide, etc. The above-mentioned active sterilization technologies have obvious sterilization effect and control effect on indoor microorganisms, but there are still some problems such as unstable sterilization effect (light blocking, electric field characteristics), secondary pollution (ozone or formaldehyde residue, heat pollution), high toxicity (chemical bactericide), poor application effect in the whole process of buildings and so on. Filters with antibacterial agent are effective in removing biological pollution in the air.
Recently, metal nanoparticles (silver (Abdulla et al. 2021)(Balagna et al. 2020), copper (Chowdhury et al. 2013)(Cao et al. 2014)) and natural plant essential oils (thyme essential oil (Salussoglia et al. 2020), Picea abies essential oil (Asanović et al. 2010) were widely used in antibacteria filter materials due to their sterilization efficiency, but their persistence of germicidal efficacy and high cost limited their use as a common antimicrobial agents. In addition, heavy metal ions also have certain biological toxicity to pose a threat to human health (Sánchez-López et al. 2020). Triclosan (2,4,4-trichloro-2-hydroxy-diphenyl ether, TCS) is well known as a broad-spectrum and environment-friendly antimicrobial and has been successfully used as an antibacterial agent in oral hygiene products (Kim et al. 2015), cosmetics (Halla et al. 2018) and the adhesive resin in dentistry (Machado et al. 2019).
Studies(Guo et al. 2020);(Aminu et al. 2019);(Paula et al. 2019);(Petersen 2014) on the application of triclosan in the field of stomatology found that triclosan has a good effect to disinfect the bacteria. And the more concentrated the triclosan was, the better antibacterial effect was observed. In a low concentration of antibacterial research, triclosan's antibacterial performance was manifested in inhibiting bacterial growth and reducing adherence to the polymer. Triclosan as an antimicrobial preparation of textile materials had also showed a good antibacterial effect (Karaszewska et al. 2017);(Cui et al. 2015);(Peila et al. 2013). At present, although filter materials with anti-microbe performance were ordinary, it still lacks the detailed information on the use and efficacy of triclosan as antibacterial agent applied to ventilation filter materials.
Therefore, the aims of this study are (1) to prepare three kinds of triclosan-loaded antibacterial filter materials and (2) to assess the antibacterial capability of triclosan treated on filter fiber materials. Chemical fiber (CF), glass fiber (GF) and non-woven fabrics (NF) were selected as the experimental filter materials, based on these materials widely used in ventilation filter. Triclosan was loaded on the filter materials by soaking method. In the study, Escherichia coli (E. coli, Gram-negative), Staphylococcus albus (S. albus, Gram-positive) and Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus, Gram-positive) were chosen as the biological agents for testing the antibacterial capability of triclosan-treated filter materials.