UV treatment is definitely a ...

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UV treatment is definitely a good option for many water treatment applications, and LED technology greatly improved this kind of treatment. On the other hand, users should not forget that UV, like filtration, treat just the water, only in the point of application , and does not guarantee 100% effectiveness in removing bacteria. So the (few) surviving bacteria can colonize the pipelines downstream to the treatment. Indeed, even if UV can reach 99.99% effectiveness, one surviving bacterium can give rise to biofilm. For this reason it is extremely important to (a) check the effectiveness of UV treatment during the time, (b) periodically clean pipelines (e.g. with chemicals), (c) check the effectiveness of pipeline cleaning. We have already seen such kind of problems in different industries using UV treatment, i.e. bacterial settlement and biofilm growth downstream to UV, due to inappropriate pipeline cleaning. Biofilm monitoring ( http://www.alvim.it ) downstream to the point of application of UV can help to avoid many problems.

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I completely agree Giovanni. You raise some very important points.An additional method used in some applications is the addition of low levels of chlorine to provide a residual in the disinfection system.Another method is to use a second barrier at the point-of-entry or point-of-use to ensure any distribution network issues are deal with.

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