Patents Indicate Growing UV LED Potential

UV LED lights are expected to grow nearly 10-fold in six years according to a new report by Research and Markets. “UV LED – Key Patent Analysis and Market Forecast 2012 – 2018″ was released and the research provides a comprehensive overview of the UV LED industry for the period 2012-2018, the related companies and the research institutes in the two aspects of markets and patents.

UV lamps are rapidly replacing mercury with the help of high efficiency and high output, because UV LEDs using UV light sources have more advantages than existing Hg lamps.

With these advantages, UV LED products are expected to replace existing mercury UV lamps rapidly. In fact, UV LEDs have already started to replace mercury-vapor lamps in many applications. In addition, there are on-going efforts to apply the UV LED technology to the fields of agriculture and medicine and some products are being deployed at initial prototype stage.

UV LEDs are expected to show rapid growth in the UV lamp market. The share of UV LEDs is expected to grow from 11 percent ($53M) in 2012 to 62 percent ($521M) in 2018. The data used in this report extracted from patents filed in Korea, the United States, Japan and Europe until June, 2013.

Photo: Flickr via MakerBot’s photostream.