Shen Hongchen, Zhou Zhe, Wang Haihuan, Zhang Mengyang, Han Minghao, Durkin David P, Shuai Danmeng, Shen Yun
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 20052, United States.
Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, California 92521, United States.
Environ Sci Technol Lett. 2021 May 17;8(7):545-550. doi: 10.1021/acs.estlett.1c00337. eCollection 2021 Jul 13.
Airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 plays a critical role in spreading COVID-19. To protect public health, we designed and fabricated electrospun nanofibrous air filters that hold promise for applications in personal protective equipment (PPE) and the indoor environment. Due to ultrafine nanofibers (∼300 nm), the electrospun air filters had a much smaller pore size in comparison to the surgical mask and cloth masks (a couple of micrometers versus tens to hundreds of micrometers). A coronavirus strain served as a SARS-CoV-2 surrogate and was used to generate aerosols for filtration efficiency tests, which can better represent SARS-CoV-2 in comparison to other agents used for aerosol generation in previous studies. The electrospun air filters showed excellent performance by capturing up to 99.9% of coronavirus aerosols, which outperformed many commercial face masks. In addition, we observed that the same electrospun air filter or face mask removed NaCl aerosols equivalently or less effectively in comparison to the coronavirus aerosols when both aerosols were generated from the same system. Our work paves a new avenue for advancing air filtration by developing electrospun nanofibrous air filters for controlling SARS-CoV-2 airborne transmission.
严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒2（SARS-CoV-2）的空气传播在新冠病毒病（COVID-19）传播中起着关键作用。为保护公众健康，我们设计并制造了电纺纳米纤维空气过滤器，有望应用于个人防护装备（PPE）和室内环境。由于具有超细纳米纤维（约300纳米），与外科口罩和布口罩相比，电纺空气过滤器的孔径要小得多（几微米对几十到几百微米）。一种冠状病毒株用作SARS-CoV-2的替代物，用于产生气溶胶以进行过滤效率测试，与之前研究中用于产生气溶胶的其他试剂相比，它能更好地代表SARS-CoV-2。电纺空气过滤器表现出优异的性能，能捕获高达99.9%的冠状病毒气溶胶，优于许多商用口罩。此外，我们观察到，当两种气溶胶由同一系统产生时，相同的电纺空气过滤器或口罩去除氯化钠气溶胶的效果与去除冠状病毒气溶胶的效果相当或更低。我们的工作通过开发用于控制SARS-CoV-2空气传播的电纺纳米纤维空气过滤器，为推进空气过滤开辟了一条新途径。
