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Language: English

Conflict of Interest: In relation to this article, we declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Publication history: Received November 15, 2006
Accepted June 28, 2007

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Characteristics of Nylon 6 nanofilter for removing ultra fine particles

Gil Tae Kim Young Chull Ahn^1† Jae Keun Lee²

Housing & Urban Research Institute, Korea National Housing Corporation, Gyunggi 463-704, Korea ¹School of Architecture, Pusan National University, San 30, Jangjeon-dong, Keumjeong-gu, Busan 609-735, Korea ²Department of Mechanical Engineering, Pusan National University, San 30, Jangjeon-dong, Keumjeong-gu, Busan 609-735, Korea

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, March 2008, 25(2), 368-372(5), 10.1007/s11814-008-0061-y

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Abstract

Electrospinning is a fabrication process that uses an electric field to make polymer nanofibers. Nanofibers have a large specific surface area and a small pore size; these are good properties for filtration applications. In this paper, the filtration characteristics of a Nylon 6 nanofilter made by electrospun nanofibers are tested as a function of the fiber diameter. Nanofilter media with diameters in the range of 100-730 nm can be produced in optimized conditions. The pressure drop of a Nylon 6 nanofilter linearly increases with the increasing face velocity. An electrospun Nylon 6 filter (mean fiber diameter: 100 nm) shows a much lower pressure drop performance relative to the commercial HEPA filter media when the filtration efficiency of the Nylon 6 nanofilter and the HEPA filter are over 99.98% with test particles of 0.02-1.0 μm in diameter. The pressure drop at 5 cm/s of the face velocity is measured as 27 mmAq for the Nylon 6 nanofilter media, and 37.1 mmAq for the HEPA filter media. The particle size with minimum efficiency decreases with the decreasing fiber diameter. And the minimum efficiency becomes greater as the fiber diameter is decreased.

Keywords

Electrospinning Nanofibers Nanofilter MPPS Nano-particle

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