Electrostatic charged nanofiber filter for filtering airborne novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and nano-aerosols

The World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak as a pandemic on March 12, 2020. Within four months since outbreak in December 2019, over 2.6 million people have been infected across 210 countries around the globe with over 180,000 deaths. COVID-19 has a size of 60–140 nm with mean size of 100 nm (i.e. nano-aerosol). The virus can be airborne by attaching to human secretion (fine particles, nasal/saliva droplets) of infected person or suspended fine particulates in air. While NIOSH has standardized N95, N99 and N100 respirators set at 300-nm aerosol, to-date there is no filter standards, nor special filter technologies, tailored for capturing airborne viruses and 100-nm nano-aerosols. The latter also are present in high number concentration in atmospheric pollutants. This study addresses developing novel charged PVDF nanofiber filter technology to effectively capture the fast-spreading, deadly airborne coronavirus, especially COVID-19, with our target aerosol size set at 100 nm (nano-aerosol), and not 300 nm. The virus and its attached aerosol were simulated by sodium chloride aerosols, 50–500 nm, generated from sub-micron aerosol generator. PVDF nanofibers, which were uniform in diameter, straight and bead-free, were produced with average fiber diameters 84, 191, 349 and 525 nm, respectively, with excellent morphology. The fibers were subsequently electrostatically charged by corona discharge. The amounts of charged fibers in a filter were increased to achieve high efficiency of 90% for the virus filter but the electrical interference between neighbouring fibers resulted in progressively marginal increase in efficiency yet much higher pressure drop across the filter. The quality factor which measured the efficiency-to-pressure-drop kept decreasing. By redistributing the fibers in the filter into several modules with lower fiber packing density, with each module separated by a permeable, electrical-insulator material, the electrical interference between neighboring charged fibers was reduced, if not fully mitigated. Also, the additional scrim materials introduced macropores into the filter together with lower fiber packing density in each module both further reduced the airflow resistance. With this approach, the quality factor can maintain relatively constant with increasing fiber amounts to achieve high filter efficiency. The optimal amounts of fiber in each module depended on the diameter of fibers in the module. Small fiber diameter that has already high performance required small amounts of fibers per module. In contrast, large diameter fiber required larger amounts of fibers per module to compensate for the poorer performance provided it did not incur significantly additional pressure drop. This approach was applied to develop four new nanofiber filters tailored for capturing 100-nm airborne COVID-19 to achieve over 90% efficiency with pressure drop not to exceed 30 Pa (3.1 mm water). One filter developed meeting the 90% efficiency has ultralow pressure drop of only 18 Pa (1.9 mm water) while another filter meeting the 30 Pa limit has high efficiency reaching 94%. These optimized filters based on rigorous engineering approach provide the badly needed technology for protecting the general public from the deadly airborne COVID-19 and other viruses, as well as nano-aerosols from air pollution which lead to undesirable chronic diseases.