In the era of normalization of epidemic prevention and control, "nucleic acid testing" and "antigen testing" have gradually become commonplace in people's lives, especially when they go out of town and have to go through layers of testing. In the process of nucleic acid testing, sampling swab is an essential tool, nucleic acid swab material is not ordinary cotton material, but a special material processed by textile technology.
New crown nucleic acid testing used to poke the throat or nose swab, the proper name should be called sterile sampling swab, also called pharyngeal swab, through the sampling of different parts can be divided into nasopharyngeal swab and oropharyngeal swab. The swab absorbs the sample of secretion by direct contact with the nasopharynx or oropharynx, then the head with the secretion is loaded into the culture solution, the handle is broken through the break point, the lid is sealed and sent for testing.
In daily life cotton swabs raw materials for skim cotton, and sampling swabs look similar to ordinary cotton swabs, but the tip is actually flocked swabs.
The traditional swab material is mainly cotton, rayon, polyester, alginates, polyamide, etc.. The fibers are wrapped around one end of the plastic stick, and the specimen is hindered by the cavity between the fibers, which cannot be released and affects the subsequent testing results.
Compared with traditional swabs, flocked swabs are made by electrostatic flocking technology and can absorb 142ul of specimen and release about 80% of specimen, while traditional swabs can only absorb 28ul of specimen and release about 20% of specimen.
Electrostatic flocking is a kind of textile technology that uses the physical property that charges repel each other and attract each other, so that the lint is negatively charged. When the object to be flocked is placed at zero potential or grounded, the lint is attracted by the heteropotential plant body and accelerates vertically to the surface of the object to be flocked, and because the plant body is coated with adhesive, the lint is stuck vertically to the plant body, so electrostatic flocking is the use of Therefore, electrostatic flocking is a new production process that takes advantage of the natural characteristics of electric charge.
The key step in the textile flocking process is the control of the applied voltage and the distance between the poles. In the flocking process, reasonable control of the relationship between the applied voltage and the distance between the poles can not only improve the flocking density, but also save energy and improve production efficiency.
The flocking process of flocked swabs is similar to flocking of textile fabrics, and the nylon staple fiber pile used has its unique advantages, compared with traditional cotton fiber, the use of nylon flocked swabs makes the entire sampling swab sampling area without absorption holes, the sampling sample will not be scattered and retained in the fiber, which is conducive to faster and more efficient elution, experimental studies show that the collection and release of flocked swabs can reach 95% of the sample, while cotton swabs Only about 20%. Therefore, the use of flocked swabs has great advantages for various sample collection applications.
Flocked swabs vertically attach millions of nylon staple hairs to the head of the medical ABS swab stem through an electrostatically charged flocking process. The vertical nylon staple acts like a soft brush, leaving the user with no foreign body sensation during the sampling process. It also has good biocompatibility.
