• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.26 no.8
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• pp.1102-1114
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• 2002

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 collection efficiency of the filter media used in manufacturing cabin air filters was investigated by using poly-disperse particles when submicron particles were loaded. Long-term experiments were conducted by applying two different charging states, which were spray electrification and charge equilibrium by bipolar ionization. In order to investigate the effect of particle loading in filter media, NaCl particles were generated from 0.1% and 1% solutions by an atomizer. Liquid DOS particles were used to evaluate the effect of liquid particles on the collection efficiency of an electret filter. The results show significant effect of charge amount and size distribution of loading particles on the collection performance of a filter media in submicron region. Smaller particles loaded in electret fibers cause a more rapid degradation in collection efficiency and have lower minimum efficiency with time. The pressure drop of a filter media do rarely increase when the collection efficiency decreases to the minimum value. For the larger particles charged by spray electrification, which have charge amounts more than that of Boltzmann equilibrium charge distribution, the pressure drop of a filter media slowly increases in comparison with that of equilibrium charged particles. For DOS particles it is shown that the charging level of an electret filter severely decreases and the collection efficiency is below 10% in some particle size range.