Current Status of Pulsed UV Light Technology for Food, Water, and Food Processing Surface Decontamination

Abstract As the world’s population grows, it is becoming more and more challenging for people to access safe and nutritious food due to contamination issues. Decontamination of foods, water/wastewater, packaging materials, and contact surfaces are essential to eliminate the harmful microorganisms. Furthermore, conventional decontamination technologies lead to some problems in the targeted food product, such as loss of nutrients, chemical residues in the foods, chemical wastes affecting natural sources, and an increase in energy consumption. Therefore, novel decontamination technologies are needed. Especially, non-thermal, innovative, and emerging decontamination technologies are getting significant attention. Among these techonologies, Pulsed UV light (PUV) is one of the non-thermal technologies used for decontamination purposes. PUV consists of a broad spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared range, and is rich in the highly germicidal UV-C light range. In the PUV system, high-intensity electromagnetic energy is stored and emitted as short-duration, high-intensity light pulses. The PUV decontamination technique is more sustainable and environmentally friendly than conventional techniques due to its fast decontamination time, no chemical residues, and lower energy requirements. Furthermore, it has less negative impact on the quality characteristics and nutritional values of the targeted product compared to traditional decontamination techniques. Therefore, this review presents recent PUV applications for the decontamination of solid and liquid foods, water/wastewater, food packaging materials and contact surfaces. In particular, the generation of PUV, the advantages and limititations of PUV applications, decontamination mechanisms throughout the target material, and the effect of PUV application on the product quality have been discussed. Graphical Abstract