Features and Benefits of UV Sciences UVS Ultraviolet Systems
The compact and efficient UVS series UV reactors use new state-of-the art technology to save space, energy, and operating costs while meeting and exceeding the performance requirements of the industry.
Key Features of UV Sciences Ultraviolet Systems
UV Sciences reactors provide unprecedented levels of UV dosage in less space, and with fewer lamps.
- Maximum utilization of the light generated by ultraviolet lamps.
- Maximum exposure of the water to the critical wavelengths of UV.
- Smallest unit on the market for a given flow rate and dose rate.
- Most energy efficient on the market for a given flow rate and dose rate.
Standard Features:
- 316L and 304 stainless steel construction
- Ra-15 finish for all wet contact surfaces
- Low Pressure Amalgam lamps
- Static Operation up to 1 hour (no flow)
- NIST traceable UV intensity monitor with LED output on control panel
- provides real-time lamp intensity information.
- 4-20mA signal for data logging of UV intensity.
- High operating pressure (150 psig)
- NEMA 4X Control panel with remote monitoring and control capability
- 4-20mA scaled analog output
- Remote Shut off
- Alarms for lamp out and power off
- Sanitary fittings and Viton gaskets
- Easy change-out UV lamp replacement (no tools required)
- UL and CE approved. TUV verified.
Benefits of UV Sciences Ultraviolet Systems
The UVS series offers significant benefits over competitive systems. Many of the benefits are unique to the UVS design, creating the most efficient UV reaction chamber. UV Sciences design increases the efficiency of chamber resulting in unmatched UV performance (PATENTS PENDING).
As a result of increased efficiencies of the UVS Reactors, it is now possible to deliver a standard ultraviolet dose with fewer and shorter UV lamps. Fewer and shorter lamps cost less, require less energy, and reduces operating expenses. costs. Additionally this reduces the cost of spare parts and maintenance costs.
- Benefits of the UVS Series
- Less Space Required for Equivalent dose (Illustration below)
- Fewer and Shorter Lamps
- Reduced Energy Consumption
- Lower Overall Operating Costs
- Lower Spare Parts and Maintenance Costs
- NIST Traceable UV Monitor
- Static Operation (No Flow) up to 1 Hour
- Standard High Pressure (150 psig)
- Standard Sanitary Design
Same UV rating, Same UV performance, Same application, 1/4th the size and 1/4th the operating costs.
About UV Disinfection & Benefits of UVS Reactor Chamber
Applications for UV disinfection continue to grow. Disinfection requirements become more challenging and stringent as the need for product improvement continues to pressure industry.
Ultraviolet (UV) light, specifically the 254 nm wavelength, is a powerful disinfectant. The advantage of using UV for water treatment over other methods (specifically chemical) is that there is no residual chemical or hazardous by-product at the end of the process. UV is a "natural" choice for disinfection and purification of water. However, UV water treatment chambers suffer from the fundamental drawback in that ultraviolet light is absorbed by common materials, such as stainless steel.
Stringent quality and disinfection requirements for the production of water purification equipment offer the designer few choices regarding materials to use for the UV treatment chambers. UV light degrades and ages common polymers (polypropylene) to the point their use in treatment chambers is unacceptable. Stainless steel meets stringent quality and strength requirements, but it absorbs UV light energy. Non-metal UV resistant materials are exotic and expensive, or inadequate when subjected to intense UV energy found inside the UV water treatment chamber. Therefore designers make tradeoffs to ensure the integrity, unit life, and disinfection performance is maintained. These tradeoffs always come at the expense of efficiency.
High quality water treatment chambers used in industrial/commercial applications such as, beverage manufacturing, semiconductor processing, and pharmaceutical manufacturing, are made from high grade stainless steel (SS316-L). And most of the UV light emitted by the lamp is wasted as it is converted to heat (a function of the UV light being absorbed by the stainless steel housing). The solution to this drawback has been to "pack" the UV treatment chamber with multiple UV lamps, as many as 44 in one treatment chamber. Additionally numerous chamber baffles are installed to ensure sufficient water mix for adequate UV light exposure.
The down sides to this typical design solution is that the treatment chamber is very large (to house the large quantity of lamps), the energy costs associated with powering all the lamps is high, and the maintenance costs to replace the lamps is substantial. Improving the efficiency of the treatment chamber would deliver immediate benefits to the End User. Power consumption, operational and maintenance costs of their UV equipment would be greatly reduced. So, what IF the treatment chamber did not absorb most of the UV light, BUT reflected that light back into the water medium?
Ultraviolet Sciences Inc. (UVSI) has responded this question with the development of a water treatment chamber that does NOT absorb UV light. UVSI has been awarded United States Government Patent No. 7,511,281 for its highly efficient ultraviolet light treatment chamber. The patent is a result of nearly two years of scientific study and engineering development efforts to improve the efficiency of UV water treatment chambers.
CONVENTIONAL SYSTEMS COMPARED TO THE HIGHLY REFLECTIVE CHAMBER DESIGN.
Conventional UV disinfection chambers lose nearly all (>90%) of their UV light energy into the outer wall of the treatment chamber. The UVSI disinfection chamber is different, its outer wall is highly reflective. This chamber design dramatically lowers the loss of UV light energy. See illustration below.
An added benefit of the highly reflective treatment chamber is that the UV dose is very uniform throughout the volume of water. Engineering models show how efficient this design is, using nearly all the UV light energy, and keeping it in the water flow tube. Computer ray-tracing simulation of only 10 rays (photons) shows the large number of reflections and subsequent increase in effective intensity of the light. See illustration below:
EFFICIENCY COMPARISON (GALLONS PER KILOWATT-HR.)
The result of the highly reflective chamber design is that the UV light energy (photon) remains in the water medium until it is finally absorbed by a microbe or chemical molecule such as chloramines. This "conservation of energy" results in a water treatment chamber that does not suffer from the efficiency drawback of conventional units. Chambers therefore, can be made smaller, with fewer and smaller UV lamps, delivering the same disinfection dosage of units much larger in size. Energy costs are significantly reduced in the process. The figure below illustrates the efficiency improvement of the UVSI treatment chambers (gallons of water disinfected per Kilowatt-Hr) when compared to conventionally designed water treatment chambers:
The net effect of the high reflective chamber is a 3X to 7X improvement in efficiency when compared to an equivalent flow rate system. Keeping the UV photon in the water medium, instead of turning it into heat as it is absorbed by the housing, delivers significant improvement in disinfection performance.
UNIFORM FLOW IS A NECESSITY TO ENSURE PROPER UV DOSAGE.
Having a uniform flow pattern throughout the treatment chamber creates an optimal situation for delivering a predictable UV disinfection dose. UVSI used fluid dynamics modeling tools to optimize the flow tube annulus, designing a chamber that has a uniform flow rate. The relatively small size of the UVS chamber results in turbulent flow over a wide range of operating flow rates. Only a single baffle is needed at the inlet. This uniform flow rate coupled with our highly reflective chamber delivers a uniform UV dose throughout the entire chamber length. The illustration below is a 3-D model of the flow through our 500 GPM unit chamber, which is four inches in diameter and only 40 inches long.
SUMMARY
The highly reflective chamber results in significant benefits to the design of UV water treatment chambers. UV treatment chambers are now significantly smaller, they require fewer UV lamps and they use significantly less energy. This translates to huge savings in operating and maintenance costs, without compromising disinfection performance.
Advantages of Reflector Technology for UV Water Treatment Systems
UV Sciences new UVS family of UV light-based water purification chambers represent a dramatic improvement in the energy efficiency of UV water treatment chambers. The patented design features incorporated into the UVS series of highly reflective treatment chambers use fundamental science to provide superior performance. Under a wide range of UV transmittances, these chambers deliver the desired UV dose to the product more efficiently and uniformly than any other chamber available today.
This efficiency increase is so large that it often invites skepticism as to whether it is possible to truly achieve such an increase. However, the UVS performance improvement over conventional stainless steel-chambered reactors and even those using some type of reflector to improve the efficiency is based on one of the most basic principles in physics - conservation of energy.
In order to deliver the most energy to a target from a fixed source of energy, one must eliminate energy losses to the highest extent possible. In a situation in which the target occupies a relatively small amount of the volume near the source of the energy, that energy must be contained in a volume within the vicinity of the target to ensure that the target has adequate opportunity to absorb the energy. If the energy is not contained, it will have much less opportunity to be absorbed by the target. With a small target and poor containment, most of the energy will be lost before it can interact with the target. Good performance requires that the reflector must enclose the volume as completely as possible. In a practical chamber, there will be openings in the enclosure (water inlets and outlets are one example), but the size of these should be minimized to achieve the best performance.
A small target also requires the designer to minimize any other absorbers within the volume, so that the energy is mostly deposited in the target rather than the other absorbers. This includes the reflector - it must absorb as little energy as possible to create a very efficient system. From a practical standpoint, this means that the reflector employed must have as high a reflectivity as possible, and that anything inside the chamber must be designed to absorb as little of the energy as possible.
When these design concepts are strictly followed, the performance improvement can be truly remarkable, as shown in Figure 1. The important thing to note with this graph is that the reflector must have both a high reflectivity and a high chamber coverage percentage. Both are necessary to achieve a high enough increase in performance to make the added complexity of such a chamber worthwhile from a cost perspective.
Figure 1 shows that a >10X improvement over conventional chambers can be realized even in practical systems. This is a large enough improvement to make implementation of such a chamber practical at almost any flow rate. Other companies manufacture treatment chambers employing reflectors, but these reflectors usually have a peak reflectance of approximately 90% and effective chamber coverage of about 80%. These parameters are not sufficient to create a significant performance advantage over conventional systems. Also, as can be seen from Figure 1, improving only one of these parameters will not substantially increase the performance of the chamber. This combination of the high reflectance and high chamber coverage forms the basis for our patent (US 7,511,281 and subsequent applications) covering this type of treatment chamber.
Figure 2 shows two chambers which are identical except for the fact that one has a highly reflective chamber wall and the other does not.
Figure 2. Intensity in an absorbing medium is higher and more uniform with a highly reflective wall than with an absorbing wall.
The overall intensity in the chamber is the sum of the incident light plus any reflected light off the walls. In Figure 2, the graphs assume that the light source is at the left hand side of the axis, and that the chamber wall is at a distance d away from the source. Only one reflection at the wall is shown in this case, but multiple reflections are possible. A wall with poor reflection as shown on the left in Figure 2, causes the intensity inside the chamber to vary significantly as a function of distance from the source. If the wall is very reflective, the overall intensity is higher and there is less of a drop in intensity from the source to the wall. This results in a higher and more uniform dose within the chamber. Even in liquids with lower UVT, a highly reflective chamber will improve both the dose rate and the dose uniformity that the product encounters. This concept is also covered in a pending patent application.
UVSI has greatly improved the performance of UV water treatment processes. For information on how UV light can help you with your water treatment processes please contact us.
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