Date of Award

3-14-2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Systems Engineering and Management

First Advisor

Michael E. Miller, PhD.

Abstract

Obtaining a cost effective way to produce safe drinking water is not only a priority of almost every residential community in the United States, but the Department of Defense has a specific interest cutting edge technology in this domain for disinfecting water in a foreign nation during a war campaign. The development of ultraviolet (UV) Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology is a potentially important step towards being able to conduct this kind of disinfection with fewer resources. The traditional UV source in use for disinfection today is the mercury lamp. This UV source requires high amounts of voltage, requires significant periods of time for warming up, and is not typically lightweight enough or versatile enough to be useful in a deployed setting. This project is intended to characterize the optical power for various short wavelength UV LEDs. This optical power is important in determining how much current is needed to deactivate bacteria and other pathogens or to optimize hydroxyl radical production to oxidize compounds in water. The results from this study indicate there is a linear relationship between optical power and current for air measurements. The data collected in this research were applied to characterize the performance of LEDs for the two tandem projects and building a model to optimize the design and performance of UV LED based reactors. Additionally, this research attempted to measure UV LED emission in water. Issues associated with these measurements are discussed.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-ENV-14-M-07

DTIC Accession Number

ADA598326

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