Electrospun nanofibers services on filter paper

This product is particularly used to produce cartridge air filters.

This product is cartridge filter paper containing Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) nanofibers with the average thickness of 50 nm. It shows a 65% enhancement in filtration efficiency by adding nanofiber, while the pressure difference between two sides of filter increases only 10 percent. Nanofibers due to large surface area, high ratio of length to width with low density causes great particle collection during the cleaning process leading to increase in the filtration efficiency. The mechanism is that the thin layer of nanofiber web forms a barrier for particles while allowing the air to “slip” through the large volume of small pores.

Filtration is any of various mechanical, physical or biological operations that separate solids from fluids (liquids or gases) by adding a filter medium through which only the fluid can pass. The filter may be paper, cloth, cotton-wool, asbestos, glass-wool, unglazed earthenware, sand, or other porous material. Nanofibers, with smaller thickness and higher surface area than regular fibers, have enormous applications in filtration. Electrospinning (also called electrostatic fiber spinning) has been one of the promising processes to produce continuous nano-scale fibers from both synthetic and natural polymers. A nanofiber layer on the surface of the filtration media captures dust particles better than clean filters without a nanofiber layer. Because the nanofiber layer media captures dust on the surface reducing depth loading, it cleans more completely and operates at a lower pressure differential across the filtration media reducing energy demands. Nanofiber performance layer media can be produced on a variety of substrate materials and built into many different filter configurations. Because of the nanofiber efficiency layer and surface loading characteristics, nanofiber layer filters last significantly longer than traditional commodity filter elements. Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) is a versatile polymer used to produce large variety of products including ultra-filtration membranes, hollow fibers for reverse osmosis, fibers for textiles and oxidized PAN fibers.