An efficient method for fabricating nanofiber air filters with minimized pressure drop for effective indoor particle removal

Abstract

Electrospun nanofiber air filters can achieve high particle filtration efficiency with lower pressure drop compared with high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters. Therefore, they can potentially be used for effective indoor particle removal. To support practical applications, this study proposed an efficient method for producing electrospun nanofiber air filters that achieve a minimized pressure drop while meeting the target particle filtration efficiency. Specifically, this method decoupled the influence of applied voltage and electrospinning time, enabling the identification of the optimal applied voltage to minimize pressure drop and the calculation of the electrospinning time needed to achieve the target filtration efficiency. Compared with the previous approach, this method eliminated the need to measure structural parameters, thereby significantly simplifying the optimization process. Experimental measurements were conducted to validate the feasibility of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can effectively achieve the target particle filtration efficiency with relative errors all less than 1% compared to the target values. Furthermore, the pressure drop of the optimized nanofiber air filters was up to 40.6% lower than that of the randomly selected filters in the verification cases. Finally, the benefits of using the optimized nanofiber air filters for indoor particle removal were numerically assessed. The results show that using the nanofiber air filters optimized by the proposed method in an air cleaner reduced indoor PM_0.3–0.4 of outdoor origin in a typical public housing apartment in Hong Kong by up to 22.7% compared to the randomly selected nanofiber air filters.