Abstract
Nowadays half of all cars are equipped with diesel engine and this number is still increasing. In 2012 IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) classified diesel exhaust as carcinogens to humans. Diesel exhaust particles (DEP), solid phase of diesel exhaust fumes, are the major compound of air pollutant. Popular device used to purifying air is fibrous filter, however, the information about DEP filtration in fibrous filters is scarce. Therefore, the goal of this study was to compare filtration efficiency of fibrous filters with different mean fiber diameter exposed to diesel exhaust particles from three commercially available diesel fuels. High effectiveness fibrous filter can be used in particulate-filtering respirators or in cab car to protect against DEP.
The highest filtration efficiencies were obtained for fibrous filter with 8.18 µm mean fiber diameter (98.5 %,95.7 %, 97.8 % for various DEP). Furthermore, the results show that small (< 100 nm), more spherical in shape aggregates are filtered with higher efficiency than similar in size, but dendrite-like aggregates, regardless of mean fiber diameter of fibrous filters.
Morphology of aggregate (size, shape) and fibrous filter structure strongly influence the DEP filtration efficiency, which can lead to difficulties during, for example, theoretical modeling of DEP filtration process.
