UV Sciences Tries to Tap Into Water Purification Industry With Smaller and Less Costly Technology

DEKA Research & Development, the Manchester, NH-based company run by Dean Kamen, who made a fortune inventing an improved insulin pump and gained fame as inventor of the Segway.

DEKA is a UV Sciences customer, Chaffee says. “We had planned a meeting with them on Thursday to review the progress on their project,” Chaffee writes in an e-mail. “One of them is an MIT grad and had seen the bulletin, and since they arrived Wednesday afternoon they asked if they could attend.”

Kamen (a Boston Xconomist) has long been interested in developing inexpensive water purification devices, ostensibly for developing countries where high infant mortality rates are attributed to poor water quality. “While they will not tell us about their final product, we do know that they are using our system to remove chlorine out of tap water,” Chaffee says. “I think it is safe to assume that it doesn’t have anything to do with 3rd world countries.”

Chaffee and Cooper explain that ultraviolet light generated by a low-pressure mercury vapor lamp sterilizes microbes by penetrating the cellular wall at two wavelengths—185 and 254 nanometers—which disrupt the organisms’ DNA.

One problem with ultraviolet light, though is that the stainless steel typically used to make water purification chambers absorbs UV light energy, so that much of the UV light emitted is converted to heat energy. To compensate, designers use multiple UV lamps—essentially adding additional lamps to ensure that all the water pumped through the chamber gets adequately exposed to UV light.  UV Sciences addressed the issue by developing a highly reflective film for the inner chamber walls, which reflects 98 percent of the UV light—instead of absorbing more than 80 percent. It sounds simple, Chaffee says, but the company has obtained two patents for the design.

UV Sciences says the UV generated at wavelengths of 185 and 254 nanometers also provide the most benefit in terms of breaking up chemical contaminants, such as chlorine compounds and long-chain hydrocarbon molecules. Chaffee says the

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.