UV-Light Water Disinfection Chamber by Anenome

Last crawled date: 4 years, 1 month ago

The basic idea here is to create a cheap water disinfection device using UV-C light.
Water goes in one side of the tube and exits the other, being bombarded with intense UV light while inside the UV-light disinfection chamber. With a slow enough flow rate or repeated passes, this will kill just about anything in the water.
The ball chamber is 6" in diameter. Ideally, the sterilization chamber would be made from a metal reflective material like stainless-steel or polished aluminum, but plastic is fine too.
The pipe ends are standard Schedule-40 1" pipe, ready to be threaded to accept standard pipe-connectors.
There are 88 evenly spaced holes designed to accept a 10mm UV LED; these can be epoxied in place, and wired electrically. The water should be clean, filtered, without particles of dirt or mud in them which can shield micro-organisms, bacteria, and viruses from the light.
UV radiation kills most organisms when the wavelength is about 265 nanometers because that is the wavelength at which DNA maximally absorbs UV light, destroying their DNA and rendering the micro-organism unable to reproduce or carry on normal cell function, after which they die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_germicidal_irradiation
Once wired electrically, cover the back so that you are not exposed to LED, the light disinfects because it is harmful to living things, including you! Please consult LED Center for info on wiring them up: http://led.linear1.org
It can be hard to find through-hole LEDs in the 10mm size (which is actually quite large) in the correct nanometer range. I leave this to you.
Should you find smaller LEDs in the 5mm size, I have included two more versions. One with 88 x 5mm holes, and one with 108 x 5mm holes.
Here is one possible source on Alibab, but they appear to be 5mm LEDs:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Hot-sell-5MM-Round-LED-Dip_62095385200.html?spm=a2700.7724857.normalList.85.193d8651cFa31Q
If someone can find a cheap and quality source of UV-C 265nm LEDs in another shape or size, I could rebuild this device to take advantage of that form-factor instead. Like we could use a square or diamond-shaped chamber with perhaps larger UV-C LEDs in a square form-factor.
Since these do not require power and are not very expensive, this could be a good way to disinfect water in many parts of the world as a last-line of defense rather than using boiling, which is very energy intensive. But this will not remove heavy metals or chemicals, it only kills micro-organisms like parasites, viruses, and bacteria.
I am not sure how long it would take to actually disinfect water with this device. It depends on light intensity and the exposure time. But because this does not require much energy to use, you can circulate water through the device with a small pump continuously over a period of time and be reasonably sure your water is disinfected, especially if you are using the correct 265 nm UV-C LED lights.
Your other option is to gravity feed from a questionable source at a very slow rate into this device, then slowly drip-feed out of it, so that the water in it all spends a considerably amount of time in the UV-chamber before it is able to drip out the bottom of the chamber. This would be an efficient way to use this device, but makes water available more slowly and requires a 2nd catch basin.
And, as always, this design includes a public-domain dedication, free for use by all. Enjoy. And if you print this and plan to use it, please let us know and show it off!