Abstract
High efficiency particle air filters are increasingly being recommended for use in heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems to improve indoor air quality (IAQ). ISO Standard 16890-2016 provides a methodology for approximating mass-based particle removal efficiencies for PM1, PM2.5, and PM10 using size-resolved removal efficiency measurements for 0.3 µm to 10 µm particles. Two historical volume distribution functions for ambient aerosol distributions are assumed to represent ambient air in urban and rural areas globally. The goals of this work are to: (i) review the ambient aerosol distributions used in ISO 16890, (ii) evaluate the sensitivity of the mass-based removal efficiency calculation procedures described in ISO 16890 to various assumptions that are related to indoor and outdoor aerosol distributions, and (iii) recommend several modifications to the standard that can yield more realistic estimates of mass-based removal efficiencies for HVAC filters, and thus provide a more realistic representation of a greater number of building scenarios. The results demonstrate that knowing the PM mass removal efficiency estimated using ISO 16890 is not sufficient to predict the PM mass removal efficiency in all of the environments in which the filter might be used. The main reason for this insufficiency is that the assumptions for aerosol number and volume distributions can substantially impact the results, albeit with some exceptions.
Highlights
High efficiency particle air filters are increasingly being recommended for use in heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems to improve indoor air quality (IAQ) by controlling indoor particulate matter (PM) from both indoor and outdoor sources [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Were made for several HVAC filters using: (i) the historical distributions used in ISO 16890, (ii) the updated ambient aerosol distributions from the literature review, and (iii) a sample of indoor and ambient-infiltrated aerosol distributions obtained from the literature review
The distributions are reported as trimodal distributions, ISO 16890 assumes they are bimodal distributions with lognormal parameter fits, which are described in Table 2 in part 1 of the standard
Summary
High efficiency particle air filters are increasingly being recommended for use in heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems to improve indoor air quality (IAQ) by controlling indoor particulate matter (PM) from both indoor and outdoor sources [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. 16890-2016 [9], describe procedures to experimentally characterize the single-pass particle removal efficiency of filters in laboratory settings. Both standards require measurements of size-resolved particle removal efficiency under various loading conditions for particles that are 0.3 μm to 10 μm in size. ASHRAE Standard 52.2 uses the resulting size-resolved removal efficiency data to classify average filter efficiency in three aggregate particle size bins within the measured range (i.e., 0.3–1 μm, 1–3 μm, and 3–10 μm). The vast majority of the epidemiological evidence of adverse health outcomes that are associated with airborne particulate matter to date has been linked to mass-based concentrations of PM1 , PM2.5 , and PM10 [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20], the ASHRAE Standard 52.2 test method does not explicitly evaluate particle removal efficiency for any of these mass-based measures
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