Evaluating Vehicle‐Borne and Person‐Worn Spray Technologies to Deliver Target Decontaminant Doses to Urban Surfaces for Biological Remediation

ABSTRACT The remediation of urban infrastructure contaminated with an environmentally persistent pathogen requires a large proportion of surfaces to be treated with liquid‐based biocides. Critical to this wide area decontamination effort, will be logistically viable approaches that apply target quantities of formulation to these surfaces while ensuring complete surface coverage over the variety of geometries present. This work quantitatively evaluated the uniformity in delivering formulations at two different target volumes of 1000 and 3700 L/ha, through a range of sprayers, to a representative urban street. Agricultural‐based spray systems were assembled from commercial‐off‐the‐shelf components and mounted onto a quad bike and mobile elevated work platform (MEWP). These provided agile methods for treating pedestrian paving, roads, front gardens, house roofs, and external walls. Also, a combination of person‐worn electric‐ and gasoline‐powered backpack sprayers was evaluated for their use in delivering formulation into dense hedgerows. A remediation strategy was proposed on how the evaluated technologies may be deployed in a system‐of‐systems approach to deliver target doses onto the structures identified in this example street while minimizing contamination spread.