Brighter LEDs improve water purification rates
Hydro-Photon, a developer of UV LED-based water treatment modules, has demonstrated water purification at flow rates close to those required for individual water treatment applications.
The company increased flow rates by switching existing UV LEDs built by Remis Gaska's group at Sensor Electronic Technologies (SET) and Asif Khan's group at the University of South Carolina (USC) with more powerful versions made by that collaboration.
Hydro-Photon's chamber can now reduce the level of e-coli spiked water flowing at 150ml/minute and 300 ml/minute by 99.99% and 99.0%, respectively.
These rates are close to values required for individual water treatment systems, which would typically require a rate of 500ml/minute. These flow rates are also a significant improvement over the 38 ml/minute rate for a 99.99% reduction of e-coli that was achieved earlier this year with the lower output power LEDs.
The latest LEDs from SET and USC deliver a UV output of 7.34 mW, compared with 2.6 mW for the previous generation of emitters.
The wallplug efficiency of the UV LEDs has also risen from 0.63% to 1.52%, while the average forward voltage has reduced from 6.6 V at 65 mA to 5.9 V at 83 mA.
