DOE OSTI2017
UV water disinfection for municipalities around the world is expected to grow over 15% annually, leading to a $2.8 billion dollar market by 2020. This growth is driving the need for higher power and more efficient UV sources. By far the greatest potential market for UV disinfection is drinking water. UV is now accepted as an available technology to deactivate Cryptosporidium and Giardia in surface water and other vulnerable sources. The output power of typical mercury-vapor UV lamps is limited to 30 W/m, requiring large arrays to treat relevant volumes of water. Higher power sources can be built with low-temperature plasmas, but require large, lossy, light-blocking magnetic cores. These cores require extensive cooling, and place a hard ceiling on power transfer to the plasma, optical efficiency, and ultimately on radiant light flux. In Phase I of this SBIR, DTI developed a novel, magnetically-coupled, toroidal pulsed plasma reactor that could run without ferrite cores, though the cores increased the coupling. DTI’s proposed geometry and exciter circuit topology enables the use of comparatively inexpensive electronic modules to operate in a pulsed-RF mode. The pulsed high-power discharge (1.5 MW peak, 500 kHz, < 5% duty cycle) creates high plasma temperatures for short durations, while maintaining a much lower steady-state temperature. This proposed reactor will be designed primarily to disinfect and denature wastewater or drinking water products, exploiting large-scale UV disinfection techniques. The UVC efficiency with the highest output power was 6.2%; for comparison, the efficiency of present high-power UV sources is 13%. It may be possible to increase the efficiency by operating pulses in a burst mode.
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗