Towards a Healthy Car: UVC LEDs in an Automobile’s HVAC Demonstrates Effective Disinfection of Cabin Air

Abstract

Vehicle Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems can accumulate and recirculate highly infectious respiratory diseases via aerosols. Integrating Ultraviolet Subtype C (UVC) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to complement automobile HVAC systems can protect occupants from developing allergies, experiencing inflammatory problems, or acquiring respiratory infectious diseases by inactivating pathogenic organisms. UVC can add little to no static pressure with minimal space, unlike mercury lamps which are larger and heavier. Additionally, UVC LEDs are effective at low voltage and have no mercury or glass. While previous experiments have shown UVC LED technology can reduce bacteriophage Phi6 concentrations by 1 log in 5 min (selected as the average time to clean the cabin air), those studies had not positioned LED within the HVAC itself or studied the susceptibility of the surrogate at the specific wavelength. This study aimed to assess the disinfection performance of UVC LEDs in automotive HVAC systems and determine the dose–response curve for bacteriophage Phi6, a SARS-CoV-2 surrogate. To achieve this, UVC LEDs were installed in a car HVAC system. To determine inactivation efficacy, a model chamber of 3.5 m3, replicating the typical volume of a car, containing the modified automobile HVAC system was filled with bacteriophage Phi6, and the HVAC was turned on with and without the UVC LEDs being turned on. The results revealed that HVAC complemented with UVC reduced bacteriophage Phi6 levels significantly more than the HVAC alone and reduced the viral concentration in the cabin by more than 90% viral reduction in less than 5 min. The performance after 5 min is expected to be significantly better against SARS-CoV-2 because of its higher sensitivity to UVC, especially at lower wavelengths (below 270 nm). HVAC alone could not achieve a 90% viral reduction of bacteriophage Phi6 in 15 min. Applying UVC LEDs inside an HVAC system is an effective means of quickly reducing the number of aerosolized viral particles in the chamber, by inactivating microorganisms leading to improved cabin air quality.

A Systematic Review on the Application of Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation to HVAC Systems

“…These studies show that the efficiency of air disinfection is strongly influenced by environmental conditions such as humidity and temperature, as well as the airflow dynamics and the installation position of the sources. This is also confirmed by [2,17,25,52,60,64,71], where field experiments were carried out, and by [20,45,68], where the problem was studied by using a mixed approach.…”

“…Mariita et al [45] aimed to establish a dose-response curve for a surrogate for SARS-CoV-2 and to evaluate the integration of UVC into car HVAC systems. The UVC LEDs imply a rapid reduction in the population in the cabin.…”

“…In 15 of the papers considered [4,15,18,20,30,32,33,35,36,38,45,53,65,68,69], both numerical and experimental analyses were carried out to validate the latter. More specifically, refs.…”

“…More specifically, refs. [4,36,45,68] investigated the irradiation field; refs. [15,32,33,35] referred to CFD simulations; and in [18,20,30,33,38,65,69], both fluid dynamics and radiation aspects are covered.…”

“…Not Reported [38] x [4] x [39] x [40] x [2] x [41] x x [42] x [43] x [44] x [45] x [46] x [47] x [1] x [48] x [49] x [50] x [51] x [52] x [53] x [54] x [55] x [56] x x x [57] x [58] x [59] x [60] x [61] x [62] x [63] x [64] x [65] x [66] x [67] x [68] x [69] x [70] x [71] x [72] x [3] x…”