Interesting question…
- Are we talking vaporize, ignite, or heat up until death for the mosquito? I’ll assume we want to minimize damage to surroundings so let’s just heat them up till they stop functioning..
- We’d need to figure out the temperature at which a majority of mosquitos will die. Since they seem to love hot weather, let’s assume we need to hit 100°C for them to fry
- Estimating the average absorption coefficient for a mosquito when illuminated with the spectrum of your favorite LED source (50% of incident radiative power absorbed?), cross sectional area presented to the beam (1mm2?), and mosquito heat capacity (likely somewhere near that of water, 75.3 J/mol.K), and average weight (2.5mg).
- Another limiting factor will likely be time-on-target for the beam. According to Wolfram Alpha the max speed of a mosquito is 1.4km/h or 0.39m/s, which means a transit time of 0.26second to fly through a 10cm diameter beam
- From 2,3,4 we can determine the radiometric power needed.
- Lux to radiometric power conversion for the spectrum is used. The rough ballpark would be 30% of LED drive power.
1.4E-4mol * 75.3J/mol.K * 100°C = 1.05J energy / 0.26 = 4.05W optical power absorbed / 0.5 = 8.1W incident on mosquito / 1mm2 = 8.1W/mm2 optical power density required to from a mosquito
From here it’s reasonably straightforward to calculate the lux level at this optical power for a given spectrum, and then go from there to a luminous output required for a given optical pattern and optical efficiency.
So, want to fund my new project? An automated anti-mosquito-cannon: Automated tracking and targeting of a pulsed high power laser that will shoot down flying bugs smaller than a bumblebee. The target acquisition and control could be tricky, but it amounts to a fun problem.
