COLUMBUS — A Galion native has lent her engineering expertise to a company’s development of a system to help fight the novel coronavirus by decontaminating equipment used by workers on the front lines.
Melissa Moneysmith Jordan, a 2002 Galion High School graduate, is an electrical engineer at Battelle in Columbus, which has built Critical Care Decontamination Systems, or CCDS, capable of sterilizing personal protective equipment desperately needed by health care workers around the country.
The mobile units, which resemble train box cars, are designed to decontaminate as many as 80,000 N95 masks a day with a concentrated hydrogen peroxide vapor. They can then be reused up to 20 times, a key factor in combating the current PPE shortage in the U.S. – and the virus.
“In light of what was happening in March, I ended up providing electrical engineering, input and guidance to the fabrication team in charge of building the CCDS units,” said Jordan, who joined Battelle three years ago. “But the vision was definitely someone else’s.”
Jordan, who normally manages and oversees facilities projects for the non-profit research and development firm, said she got a call from her boss March 13 about her new role and the project’s launch. Two days later Battelle started building the systems at one of its manufacturing operations outside of Columbus.
“It was more of an organic kind of thing,” said Jordan, who lives in nearby Delaware. “I spoke to the engineers on the team and provided support at first from another direction, and then they just realized that I could answer a lot of questions about fabrication engineering at the site.”
Battelle, which in March received emergency authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to construct the systems, has shipped them to health care providers and first responders in New York and Washington state – both hot spots for COVID-19. Others will be operating in Boston, Chicago and the Washington, D.C. area.
“They are being deployed wherever the need is the greatest,” Jordan said, “and now we’re busy training the staff to go along with the systems to operate them. We’re training the Battelle staff to actually set up and run the CCDS units on location.”
The units have a bar code tracking system, meaning each hospital or fire department receives its own respirator masks back after they have been decontaminated. Battelle is offering its services at no charge, thanks to a $400 million contract with the Pentagon, and is researching to see is if surgical masks and ventilator components could also undergo the same cleaning process.
Jordan, the daughter of Barry and Cathy Moneysmith of Galion, earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Ohio Northern University in 2006. She and her husband, Blake, have three children – Alex, 13, Lily, 11 and Lana, 9.
Jordan’s expertise in the last month has been crucial to the decontamination project’s completion, according to Katy Delaney, Battelle’s director of media relations.
“Someone was just singing her praises yesterday and said how well she did on the project,” Delaney said. “She’s just a very talented young woman and we’re pleased to have her at Battelle.”