RT Journal Article
T1 Evaluation of commercial facemasks to reduce the radioactive dose of radon daughters
A1 Gutiérrez Álvarez, Isidoro
A1 Celaya González, Santiago
A1 Fuente Merino, Ismael
A1 Quindós Poncela, Luis Santiago
A1 Sáinz Fernández, Carlos
AB Commercial facemasks have become a common tool during the COVID-19 pandemic.They are cheap, simple to use and some are capable of filtering out most particles in theair, protecting the user. These qualities are usually employed in relation to hurtful virusesor contaminants, but they could also be used to prevent the radioactive dose due toradon, which is the second leading cause of lung cancer worldwide. For that reason, themain goal of this study is to verify if facemasks could prevent radon decay products fromentering the potential user’s lungs. Since these decay products are the main source ofradioactive dose, several commercial facemasks were tested by exposing them to radonand then measuring the presence of radon daughters by gamma spectroscopy. Reusablefacemasks made from materials such as cotton, polyester or neoprene appeared to beinefficient with only 40% filtering efficiency, Polypropylene woven masks being the onlyexception, with 80% efficiency. Surgical masks presented filtering efficiencies between90 and 98%. FFP3 and FFP2 proved to be the most reliable, almost completely filtering outradon daughters with filtering efficiencies up to 98%. Results prove that the use of FFP3 and FFP2 facemasks could be a useful tool to reduce the radioactive dose due toradon in places where other techniques cannot be used or are not advisable.
PB SAGE
SN 1528-0837
SN 1530-8057 (electrónico)
YR 2024
FD 2024
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10272/24312
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10272/24312
LA eng
NO Gutiérrez-Álvarez, I., González, S. C., Merino, I. F., Quindós, L. S., & Fernández, C. S. (2024). Evaluation of commercial facemasks to reduce the radioactive dose of radon daughters. In Journal of Industrial Textiles (Vol. 54). SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.1177/15280837241247342
NO The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/orpublication of this article: This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovationand Universities, by means of the "Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia",funded by Next Generation European funds (NextGenerationEU) and managed by the University ofHuelva through the Requalification of the Spanish University System for 2021-2023.
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 30 may 2026