Unquestionably, in today’s energy-hungry world, the appliances which are too wasteful definitely will diminish from the stage of affordable energy technologies. One of the most accessible arenas that can be addressed is light sources. In this address, some 98% of the energy input ends up as heat instead of light. Halogen lamps, which look more high-tech, are not any better. This is a same story about the other kinds of traditional light irradiators. The issue would be the more challengeable obstacle whether the light defines for special approaches like water treatment issues. Compared to alternatives, ultraviolet (UV) light disinfection is very attractive because of its efficacy against all pathogen groups and minimal operational consumables. Though mercury arc lamp technology is very efficient, it requires frequent lamp replacement, involves a toxic heavy metal, and their quartz envelopes and sleeves are expensive, fragile and require regular cleaning. Perhaps the most widely anticipated of the technologies vying for center stage is the light emitting diode (LED), an emerging alternative which is semiconductor-based technology. LEDs are long-lived, robust and roughly twice as efficient as fluorescents. In fact, they are already widely used in electrical appliances. UV light emitting diodes (UVLEDs) recently have been conducted for water decontamination purposes. The new types of UV light sources provide improvements over traditional UV lamps such as better efficiency in converting electricity into light (high quantum yields), lower power requirements, compactness and robustness, no warm-up time, no disposal problems, environment-friend and longer operational life and also, design flexibility due to their small size. Furthermore, coupling the newly investigated UVLEDs with other cutting edge technologies like photovoltaic and solar energy clearly shows the effectiveness of UVLEDs light source and obviously, the mentioned claim ate the first of this quote, “this is the time to change the bulbs.”

Is it time to replace traditional UV lamps by UV-Light Emitting Diodes (UVLEDs) in water treatment industry? Towards sustainable photovoltaic-powered UVLED photoreactors

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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