Case Studies of Air Filtration at Microscales: Micro- and Nanofiber Media

Abstract

In this work, 3–D fibrous geometries are developed to resemble the microstructure of spun-bonded and electrospun filters media and used here to simulate their filtration efficiency and pressure drop. For the sake of simplicity, a continuum flow theory was considered to prevail for the case of spun-bonded media (microfiber media) whereas our electrospun media (nanofiber media) were assumed to be in a free molecular flow regime.Our simulations results are in good general agreement with the experimental data. Especially, in predicting media's pressure drop, our results show better predictions when compared to some of the existing models. We also quantitatively demonstrated that by decreasing the fiber diameter, the minimum collection efficiency of the media having identical pressure drops increases. This effect is accompanied by a decrease in the particle diameter associated with these minimum efficiencies – the most penetrating particle diameter. Studying the influence of the gas temperature, we showed that filter's efficiency increases as the gas temperature increases. Conversely, the filter's pressure drop decreases by increasing the gas temperature.