Gavriel Kleinwaks
11
5
Gavriel Kleinwaks has not written any posts yet.
Gavriel Kleinwaks has not written any posts yet.
(Let me know if I misunderstood; I'm reading your second sentence as "why aren't the companies...") On company size: The industry is split between emitter companies and consumer product companies; the emitter companies sell the far-UV emitter (basically the lightbulb) to a different company that builds the housing for consumers. The emitter companies are usually a branch of a larger electronics/lighting company; the consumer product companies are usually very small.
Some companies have run their own studies, but most of their installations are much too small to be studies in themselves. One problem I've heard about in the case of at least one larger installation is that the customer who sought the installation wanted the data to remain confidential. Otherwise, large studies are indeed mostly too costly for these companies to self-fund entirely, but they may offer partial funding or provide their lamps at-cost or as donations to studies.
Why there isn't more ground-up interest: it's expensive and people can't easily tell if it's worth the cost. Also anything where UV is touching you has to overcome people's safety concerns.
Good question on the large effects are easily measured thing--has to do with the distinction between: 1) in what environments you are cleaning the air, 2) how much you are cleaning the air there, 3) how much pathogen people inhale, and 4) how much pathogen is required to actually make people sick. It's not just a far-UV problem, it'd be a problem for any air cleaner, it's just that far-UV is especially expensive to install and especially faces negative "UV" associations.
Far-UV has... (read more)
The word duct doesn't appear here because far-UV installation is most useful (compared with other wavebands) for whole-room application--agree that UV in ductwork has the potential to be very useful, but you'd use a longer wavelength if people weren't going to be directly exposed, because you can crank up the power on longer UVC wavelengths without producing tons of ozone. (Far-UV is specifically 200-230 nm, but UVC goes up to 280 nm.) I focus on far-UV because the excitement about far-UV specifically has to do with whether there's potential for it to be installed in such a way that it can stop in-room pathogen transmission before air entirely circulates or recirculates, which... (read more)
(Austin is very kind--I am not close to being the world expert in far UV deployment; there are people who run/used to run companies trying to do that, and researchers who work with them very closely, who know more about far-UV deployment, and I'm largely consolidating information from them.)
My description was a pretty quick gloss, but yep, the government is large and I know partners have been inquiring with various offices. Getting money is always going to be a problem. Honestly part of it is, let's say it takes three years to get funding for [something you care about], it's not actually that long in government timelines but it feels like forever when you work at a small organization or company and your work revolves around that particular thing.