Ultraviolet Sensors to Enable and Enhance Non Contact germicidal sanitisation (UV-SEE-NoCo)

The worldwide lockdowns in response to the Covid-19 pandemic have saved lives but led to massive disruption to how we live, immense personal sacrifices and economic challenges for the UK and other countries. It is now becoming clear that we will need to develop strategies to relax or emerge from lockdown before a vaccine against coronavirus is widely available.

Resuming "normal" life and economic activity will require people to become confident that it is safe for them to return to shared spaces, public transport, social venues etc. and that they can safely handle objects which others have touched, used or prepared: parcels, clothing, meals, cutlery and so on.

In many settings it will not be practical or appropriate to use chemical disinfectants on a widespread and continuous basis: one cannot perpetually spray bleach within a bus or prove that no-one has coughed near your place setting in a restaurant. In many cases a non-chemical, non-contact disinfecting method will be required and fortunately one already exists. Deep ultraviolet light ("UV-C") is already known and used to disrupt the genetic material of germs including viruses, bacteria and fungi. Because of the way it works this does not depend on further detailed studies of coronavirus: with a strong enough dose it just kills the virus. UV-C disinfection is already used in some air conditioning and water purification systems, so it is almost ready-to-go against coronavirus but...

We anticipate that UV-C disinfection will become much more widely used and will be incorporated into many new and previously unimagined products. The key question will be: "how do we know it has worked?" There is no continuous real-time method for detecting coronavirus, so the only way of knowing that a UV-C disinfection can be trusted is to measure the dose of UV light.

In this project we will create a detector which is optimised for affordable deployment to validate the delivery of UV-C doses. This will be an electronic component which equipment manufacturers can build into the controls of their products to ensure that an effective "kill" dose is always applied when the equipment is used.

As an established detector manufacturer we have a team of experienced engineers who happen to have research backgrounds in designing this type of device, and a UK factory where we can't wait to start making them. To make all of us safer and get the economy back on its feet.