A New Clean Air Delivery Rate Test Applied to Five Portable Indoor Air Cleaners

Air pollution has been recognised as one of the major risk factors for the global burden of disease. In modern society the majority of the exposure occurs indoors where people spend most of their time. Indoor air quality may be improved with portable air cleaners utilizing various cleaning techniques, such as filtration, electrostatic precipitation, and ionization. The objective of this study was to quantify air cleaner particle removal by particle size resolved clean air delivery rates (CADR). This was obtained by utilizing particle concentration measurements and indoor aerosol modeling. Our test protocol was applied to five air cleaners designed for household and office use. For particles with diameters above 100nm and at the chosen settings, the CADR was around 40m(3)/h for an ion generator, around 70m(3)/h for an electrostatic precipitator, and ranging from 100 to almost 300m(3)/h for the three filter-based air cleaners. Similar performances were obtained for ultrafine particles, except for the ion generator that performed better in this size range. Copyright 2014 American Association for Aerosol Research