The current state of the art UVC (short wave, e.g. 255nm) LEDs have very low efficiency, compared to UVA (long wave, e.g. 365nm). How efficient are these 220nm solid state chips?
Do they emit other frequencies, or are they monochromatic?
The uviquity 220 nm SHG chips are super cool--they're perfectly monochromatic (though maybe with some blue light leakage) and I hear from their tech lead that they expect to get up to 10% WPE. I think that approach is definitely going to be relevant much sooner than far-UVC LEDs, but they're still early days, it's going to be a long road. Krypton-chloride excimer lamps are more or less the only game in town for commercial far-UV, at least for now.
Pretty sure that's a UVB flashlight. There's absolutely no way that anyone is selling 255nm UVC that outputs much of anything for more than a few hours for $45.
A good 280nm chip is ~$100 (https://www.ledsupply.com/leds/uv-c-280nm-nichia-ncsu334a-le...), and it gets exponentially harder to produce shorter wavelengths the further down the spectrum you go. 270nm and 265nm chips are getting there, but 255nm is mostly a research area right now.
This review paper is from 2019, but it includes a good summary of basically everyone who's relevant to the field https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-019-0359-9 The author used to keep an updated figure on his website but sadly it seems to be down, or have moved
SilannaUV has 230nm, 235nm and 250nm wavelengths, as far as I know the only supplier that does so https://silannauv.com/
I would be pretty careful with all of these wavelengths though. None of them are truly monochromatic far-UV. Use eye/skin protection when messing with them.
I've built 12V mercury vapor UV-C (254nm) lights for fluorescent mineral hunting, and that wavelength is quite harmful, requiring skin and eye protection. Mercury vapor lamps produce a spectrum of wavelengths, also in the visible spectrum, which gets filtered out since it distracts.
According to this [1] article, the 222nm range is safe for exposure, but the Krypton-Chloride bulb in the far-UVC lamp does also produce harmful wavelengths (256nm), therefore a filter is absolutely necessary. Thankfully simple plastics should work fine for that.
I would still be extremely careful deploying these lights in occupied spaces.
Edit: Come to think of it, filtering the harmful UVC (256nm) from KrCl excimer lamps with acrylic would probably also block the far-UVC. Which makes me wonder what material the filter is. Regular glass stops UVC, which is why UVC lamps are usually quartz or special glass formulations.
"What really needs to be understood is that an unfiltered 222nm Far-UV peak from any KrCl excimer lamp emits a wide band of wavelengths starting at 200nm, past the human safe zone of less than 230nm, all the way to the end of the UVC spectrum at 280nm -- with a very worrisome second harmonic peak at 256nm."
"the 222nm excimer lamp's second harmonic peak at 256nm exclusive to KrCl Far-UVC lights should be treated no different than the well-established carcinogenic hazards involved when using 254nm mercury-line UVC germicidal bulbs."
What took me by surprise (but really shouldn’t have) with my set of UV A, B, and C flashlights, is how much of the light can get reflected. Pointing at a rock and seeing a spot on my shirt light up was educational.
The filter is a hafnium oxide interference filter! There are some absorption-based filters being studied in academic settings (as they'd be potentially cheaper to manufacture) but none are used commercially as far as I know
Honestly there aren't that many commercially available unfiltered KrCl lamps out there. I'm only aware of one and it's stupid expensive. Every other lamp you can actually buy is filtered, although some filters are a bit worse than others (though still pretty safe). Any lamp module that uses the Ushio Care222 emitter is certainly very well filtered because Ushio integrates the filter into the module.
Along these lines, a current Kickstarter project, which uses a 3D printer and a saltwater jet in a very clever way to ablate metal electrochemically. It even presents the prospect of doing metal deposition printing by reversing the process/current (skip to 9:50).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3010660/
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