Conceptual design of an innovative UVC-LED air-cleaner to reduce airborne pathogen transmission

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel UVC-LED air-cleaner design with enhanced air mixing and layout to effectively reduce airborne pathogens like COVID-19, TB, and influenza with low power consumption and portability.

Contribution

The study introduces a new UVC chamber with turbulence-generating grid and innovative LED layout, improving pathogen inactivation efficiency in a portable device.

Findings

Achieves over 97% kill rate for COVID-19 and TB at 100 l/s flow rate.

Uses less than 300W power, suitable for portable or duct installation.

Demonstrates effectiveness through CFD and UVC ray simulations.

Abstract

A conceptual design of a novel UVC-LED air-cleaner is presented as part of an international educational-research study. The main components are a dust-filter assembly, a UVC chamber and a fan. The dust-filter aims to suppress dust accumulation that will hamper the UVC chamber operation. The innovation is in the UVC chamber that includes a novel turbulence-generating grid to enhance air mixing in the chamber and a novel LEDs layout to achieve sufficient kill of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and TB bacterium aerosols with a reasonable power consumption. Both diseases have hit hard low to medium income countries and this study is part of an effort to offer non-pharmaceutical solutions to mitigate the air-transmission of such diseases. Low to high fidelity methods of computational fluid dynamics and UVC ray method are used to show that the design can provide a kill above 97% for Covid and TB, and above 92% for influenza-A. This is at a flow rate of 100 l/s, power consumption of less than 300W and a device size that is both portable and may also fit into ventilation ducts. Research and educational methodologies are discussed, along with analysis of the inexpensive dust-filter performance and the irradiation and flow fields.