Experimental study of air filter performance under airborne conditions

With improvement of people's living standards, more and more people travel by plane. Air quality within this narrow and confined space is receiving increasing attention. Air quality on aircraft is guaranteed by air filters, which purify the recycled air. The filter media of air filter usually consists of fiberglass and carbon cloth, which removes particles and VOC gas respectively. Onboard equipment may encounter various environment which is specified in DO-160G. It is necessary to investigate whether air filter can meet the expected performance under harsh airborne environment. This paper investigates the impact of high temperature, high humidity, falling water and fluid spray on filtration performance of air filter. The results show high humidity, hydrophilic-fluid and hydrophobic-fluid reduce filtration capacity of fiberglass, while high temperature almost has no effect. The performance of VOC filter materials is greatly affected by the environment. High temperature has the most significant positive impact, followed by high hydrophilic fluids and humidity respectively. On the other hand, hydrophobic fluids have the most negative impact and the carbon cloth almost lost its adsorption capacity for VOC after exposure in specified hydrophobic fluids. Based on this, suggestions for installation environment and replacement of air filters are provided.