Transparent thermoplastic polyurethane air filters for efficient electrostatic capture of particulate matter pollutants

Particulate matter (PM) air pollution has been established as a significant threat to public health and a destructive factor to the climate and eco-systems. In order to eliminate the effects of PM air pollution, various air filtering strategies based on electrospun nanofibers have recently been developed. However, to date, almost none of the existing nanofibers based air filters can meet the requirements of high-performance air PM filtering, including high PM removal efficiency, low resistance to airflow, and long service life, etc. For the first time, we report a fabrication process using the electrospinning method for air filters based on thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) nanofibers. The average diameters of TPU nanofibers are tunable from 0.14 +/- 0.06 mu m to 0.82 +/- 0.22 mu m by changing the TPU concentrations in polymeric solutions. The optimized TPU nanofibers based air filters demonstrate the attractive attributes of high PM2.5 removal efficiency up to 98.92%, good optical transparency of similar to 60%, low pressure drop of similar to 10 Pa, high quality factor of 0.45 Pa-1, and long service life under the flow rate of 200 ml min(-1), which is ground-breaking compared with the existing nanofibers based air filters. These TPU nanofibers based air filters, with the excellent filtration performance and light transmittance, will shed light on the future research of nanofibers for various filtration applications and greatly benefit the public health by reducing the effects of PM air pollution.