Collection Performance of an Electret Cabin Air Filter for Fine Particles

Abstract

An electret filter is composed of permanently charged electret fibers and is widely used in applications requiring high collection efficiency and low-pressure drop. In this work, the fractional collection efficiency of the filter media used in manufacturing cabin air filters was investigated by using highly monodisperse particles ranging from 0.02 to 0.6 in diameter at three different charging states: singly charged, uncharged, and equilibrium charged. The face velocity was varied from 2.4 to 20.4 crus. It was fecund that the fractional efficiency curve fur singly charged particles shows a typical trend that the collection efficiency is minimum at about 0.3 in diameter. The fractional efficiency of equilibrium charged particles were not severely varied with the particle diameter. The collection efficiency curve fur uncharged particles has a minimum near 0.1 in diameter. Another experiment was conducted for a cartridge filter to examine the effect of charge depletion on the collection efficiency in a cabin air filter. The result shows that the charge depletion of the cartridge filter can significantly lower the collection efficiency.