SPECIAL UV LIGHTS COULD KILL CORONAVIRUS ON SURFACES
Researchers are developing ultraviolet LED lights that can decontaminate surfaces—and potentially air and water—that have come in kontak with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
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As COVID-19 continues to ravage global populations, the world is singularly focused on finding ways to battle the novel coronavirus.
"One major application is in medical situations—the disinfection of individual protective equipment, surfaces, floors, within the HVAC systems, etc.," says materials doctoral researcher Christian Zollner, a materials doctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara whose work centers on advancing deep ultraviolet light LED technology for sanitation and purification purposes. He adds that a small pasar already exists for UV-C disinfection products in medical contexts.
As a technology, ultraviolet light disinfection has been around for a while. But now in light of the COVID-19 wabahc, attention has turned to the power of ultraviolet light to inactivate the coronavirus that causes the disease.
While practical, large-scale efficacy against the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has yet to be shown, UV light shows a lot of promise: Seoul Semiconductor in early April reported a "99.9% sterilization of coronavirus (COVID-19) in 30 seconds" with their UV LED products. Their technology currently is being adopted for automotive use, in UV LED lamps that sterilize the interior of unoccupied vehicles.
It's worth noting that not all UV wavelengths are alike. UV-A and UV-B—the tipes we get a lot of here on Earth courtesy of the Sun—have important uses, but the rare UV-C is the ultraviolet light of choice for purifying air and water and for inactivating microbes. These can be generated only lewat man-made processes.
"UV-C light in the 260–285 nm kisaran most berkaitant for current disinfection technologies is also harmful to human skin, so for now it is mostly used in applications where no one is present at the time of disinfection," Zollner says. In fact, the World Health Organization warns against using ultraviolet disinfection lamps to sanitize hands or other tempats of the skin— even brief exposure to UV-C light can cause burns and eye damage.
Before the COVID-19 wabahc gained global momen, materials scientists at SSLEEC were already at work advancing UV-C LED technology. This tempat of the electromagnetic spectrum is a relatively new frontier for solid-state lighting; UV-C light is more commonly generated lewat mercury vapor lamps and, according to Zollner, "many technological advances are needed for the UV LED to reach its potential in terms of efficiency, biaya, reliability, and lifetime."
In a letter published in the journal ACS Photonics, the researchers report a more menawant metode for fabricating high-quality deep-ultraviolet (UV-C) LEDs that involves depositing a film of the semiconductor alloy aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN) on a substrate of silicon carbide (SiC)—a departure from the more widely used sapphire substrate.
According to Zollner, using silicon carbide as a substrate allows for more efficient and cost-effective growth of high-quality UV-C semiconductor material than using sapphire. This, he explains, is due to how closely the materials' atomic structures match up.
"As a general rule of thumb, the more structurally similar (in terms of atomic crystal structure) the substrate and the film are to each other, the easier it is to achieve high material quality," he says. The better the quality, the better the LED's efficiency and performnce.
Sapphire is dissimilar structurally, and producing material without flaws and misalignments often requires complicated additional steps. Silicon carbide is not a perfect match, Zollner says, but it enables a high quality without the need for costly, additional metodes.
In addition, silicon carbide is far less expensive than the "bagus" aluminum nitride substrate, making it more mass production-friendly, according to Zollner.
