UVC LED beyond Covid-19
Performance analysis and comparison report 2023 by Piseo
For some years now, the increased performance trend of UVC LED has strongly continued. Three UVC LED manufacturers – Ams Osram, Nichia, and Bolb Inc. – have brought to the market UVC LED with wall-plug efficiency (WPE) over 5 percent. This is a remarkable performance, knowing that so far Bolb Inc. has been the only UVC LED manufacturer to overtake the 5 percent threshold, and that most of the UVC LEDs on the market offer WPE between 1 percent - 4 percent.
The market is also looking for better performance in terms of lifetime, requesting significantly longer lifetime than the 8 - 12 khrs (L70) that has been reached so far by UVC LEDs. Thus, some UVC LED manufacturers are today considering lifetime as one of the main parameters to work on, appointing the necessary effort to improve this parameter. In March 2023, Crystal IS announced it has reached a lifetime of 25 khrs (L70), a remarkable step in the race for longest UVC LED lifetime.
More manufacturer announcements on performance are expected in 2023.
While LED lighting manufacturers have invested in research and development of UVC LEDs, not all of them have entered the UVC LED market. Among other factors, the performance and price of the UVC LED were limitations for the development of this emerging market, and some LED manufacturers were looking for wider adoption of the UVC LED before putting their product on the market. The significant improvements of these two factors, combined with the peak of demands brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, has led manufacturers to enter the UVC LED market. Thus, after the entry of Ams Osram in 2020, Samsung, another leader in the LED lighting market, has recently entered the market as well.
On the regulations and standardisation side, standards are being released. As such, ANSI, IES, and IUVA are active with two standards related to ultraviolet germicidal irradiation practices and UVC LED measurement, published in 2022. Moreover, ASHRAE is expected to publish an Indoor Air Quality Standard in 2023.
The combination of the recent and remarkable increases in UVC LED WPE and lifetime is reducing the gap between UVC LED-based and low-pressure mercury lamp-based systems in terms of total cost of ownership (cost of the product and the cost of operating it).
By 2028, the total cost of ownership of a UVC LED-based disinfection system could be comparable, or even more interesting, than a low-pressure mercury lamp for most disinfection / purification applications. Of course, other parameters have to be taken into account (for example, R&D efforts to design reactors adapted to UVC LED technology), and the UVC LED technology will not be established in all applications at the same time (i.e., high flow-rate water purification systems will take longer to be established than POE and POU UVC LED systems).
