India’s only UV lamp makers flooded with orders amid Coronavirus outbreak
Source：financial express
From：Taiwan Trade Centre, Kolkata
Update Time：2020/06/02
Located in the Chakan industrial zone in hotspot Pune, Arklite Speciality Lamps and Aeropure UV Systems have been working overtime these past few weeks. They are India’s only manufacturers of ultraviolet (UV) lamps that can destroy any kind of microbes in the air. UV lamps are germicidal and can disinfect water, air and surfaces.
Flooded with calls from hospitals, government organizations,start-ups and technology companies, for lamps ranging from 6 watts to 6,500 watts, they are now running two shifts.
Chairman Avinash Kulkarni points out the lamps are the most important part of the products and systems being developed to disinfect masks, sanitising food and food packaging.
“We will offer them the lamp and the entire systems with holders and ballast which will make it a plug and play module,” explains Kulkarni.
So far, 75% of the products were being exported to the US and Europe in the absence of domestic demand, but the Covid-19 pandemic has changed all that.
The UV lamps available in the market use soft glass and most of them come from China. “We chose to make quartz glass-based UV lamps which make them more expensive but offers superior performance and allows for a huge jump in wattage,” he said.
The Kulkarnis have invested heavily in R&D and their business is now worth around Rs 175 crore. Leading brands such as Voltas and Philips source their UV lamp requirements from them. Right now, 500 lamps a day are being made at the Chakan plant but there is room for expansion.
Among the first calls came from Pune’s Naidu Hospital for Infectious Diseases which is where all Covid-19 positive patients in Pune district are being treated, and his company installed the UV lamps here to disinfect the hospital air.
The UV light can destroy the RNA and DNA of the microbes, explained Kulkarni. Hospitals were not keen earlier and considered using UV lamps in the HVAC systems only because there was a 10-15% savings in the electricity bill and not because it improved air quality and killed microbes, Kulkarni said. It was only much later that they found a keen buyer in Delhi Metro which used their products to keep the underground Metro network air clean. This was followed by the Chennai Metro and Jaipur Metro picking up his product. Delhi’s T3 Terminal also has their installations.
Source：https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/indias-only-uv-lamp-makers-flooded-with-orders-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/1942690/