Air Phaser is a proprietary product produced by Air Phaser Environmental and designed to oxidize and/or reduce air-borne pollutants that need to be transformed to environmentally benign forms. The Air Phaser uses electrical discharges to destroy and break down the VOC’s present in the contaminated air. Although, the technology is effective for many VOC’s, some classes of compounds, specifically aromatic species, are not degraded enough to completely eliminate odor or potential adverse health impacts.

A series of rapid and cost effective analytical methods will be developed to enable routine screening of feedstock material and products.  These techniques include sampling with lasers so that the need for digestion with highly corrisive acids is effectively eliminated.  These techniques will have less waste and use less hazardous materials than traditional methods and this will reduce the environmental impact of critical analytical testing.   Developing these technologies will ensure that Natural Factors continues to be an industrial leader in quality assurance and cont

The proposed research will work to characterize plasmas of the type that form where the charging roll contacts the photoreceptor in a typical xerographic printer.  Laboratory experiments will form discharges under ambient atmospheric conditions and at the high-vacuum exit of a dielectric-barrier-discharge pulsed molecular beam.  Spectroscopic measurements will record fluorescence emission signatures of plasmas under these conditions, and time-of-flight mass spectrometry will monitor the presence of reactive intermediates.  

The Kothe research group studies the structure and function of small ribonucleoproteins which are involved in ribosome biogenesis, in particular in modification of ribosomal RNA, with the aim of better understanding how the cell assembles large RNAprotein complexes such as the ribosome.