Study on Compound Humidifier Employing UV-LED using Environmental Life Cycle Assessment

In this study, we assessed environmental impacts of compound humidifiers using environmental life cycle assessment and presented the ways to improvements in energy consumption of them. We found eco-design parameters and -eq emissions in each stage of raw material acquisition, manufacturing, transportation, use and disuse in life cycle of the compound humidifiers. The highest emission is found to be in the stage of use among all stages of life cycle, which is mainly due to power consumption in thermal heating of heating coil for sterilization during humidification. The power consumption and emission in the stage of use can be reduced to 1/4 and 1/3 at the highest estimate through improvement of sterilization method, respectively. We suggested the replacement of conventional thermal heating coil by ultra violet light-emitting diodes (UV-LED) for sterilization and then presented the experimental results on the sterilization effects of UV-LEDs.