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Dan Buglio is a Certified Indoor Air Quality Professional by the:
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HOW AND WHY DOES IT WORK?
Dynamic Air Cleaners work like no other air cleaners because they combine three scientific principles all together to attract and trap airborne dust particles. The three principles are impingement, polarization and agglomeration.
6,000 volts (at 22 billion ohms which make it safe for humans and virtually short-circuit proof) charge a wire mesh screen resting between two glass fiber media pads, which are sandwiched between two outside, grounded screens. This charge polarizes the glass fiber media so that dirt entering the filter is arrested by collision, electrical attraction to the fibers, and diffusion. As dirt is attracted to the filter, it actually helps increase the efficiency of the filter by contributing to the polarization and impingement effects of the filter. This whole process works without producing harmful and toxic ozone.
Impingement - a forceful coming together of two things
Impingement is the process that all media filters use to trap dust. Simply put, in order to be caught, dust particles must strike and become attached to the filter media without passing through it.
There are some problems with impingement type filtration that Dynamic Air Cleaners avoid. The main problem with impingement is the relationship between efficiency and air flow. Basically the denser filter (the more effective it is) the more restriction it has on air flow (or drop in cost efficiency). This means that the more effective an impingement air filter is, the more it will cost to implement and operate.
High Efficiency Particulate air filters (HEPA) have very high efficiency along with very dense fiber packing and very high resistance to air flow. They can work well in small areas where a large air flow is not important. But in larger spaces, HEPA filters require powerful fans to move the air through the filter, thus restricting their usefulness. They can also be very costly and noisy.
Dynamic Air Cleaners, avoid most of the impingement problems by engaging polarization and agglomeration to increase the effectiveness of the filter media, permitting very high efficiency with low resistance to air flow.
Polarization
It has been known almost since the discovery of electricity that an electrical charge will have an influence on any object in the vicinity of the charge.
In the case of Dynamic Air Cleaners, a very strong (6000 volt) static electric charge is established on a screen. Very close to this static charge, and being influence by it, are both the filtering media and the dust particles. As a result, both the filter media and the dust particles take on an electrostatic charge, or "polarized" charge.
To understand more clearly the meaning of this polarizing effect, one can imagine each filter strand and each dust particle as acting like a series of tiny magnets. Most of us have played with or experimented with magnets. This experience has shown us that magnets will attract one another from a distance. The magnetic force will draw the magnets together, finally causing them to stick to one another. In other words, each magnet has an influence over a distance far larger than its actual physical size.
The same situation occurs with the polarized particles in a Dynamic Air Cleaner. The area of influence of each polarized particle is far greater than its actual physical size, and polarized particles can be drawn together from a distance. In other words, many more dust particles will be attracted by a single strand of filtering media when it is polarized. This means the collecting effectiveness of each strand is intensified and therefore the overall efficiency of the filter is increased by the polarizing voltage. Of course, this improvement is achieved without increasing the resistance to air flow. In fact, lower density filtering materials can be used and therefore pressure drops actually decrease.
One other important fact about polarized particles is that they only remain polarized as long as they are influenced by the static charge. If dust particles leave the filter, they will carry no residual charge and will be free to travel through the system without adhering to objects in the room. They can then be captured on a subsequent pass.
Polarization effects account for a large proportion of the dust trapping effectiveness of Dynamic Air cleaners.
Agglomeration - a mass of things gathered together
Dust particles, as we have said, when they enter the Dynamic filter are polarized by the high static charge. Because this causes them to act like tiny magnets, four things can happen to these dust particles:
- They can strike or be attracted to the polarized strands of the filter media. In this case, they will be captured on the filter.
- They can strike or be attracted to one another. In this case, they will stick together and form larger particles. This process is known "agglomeration". The larger agglomerated particles can then strike or be attracted to the filter media and be captured on it.
- The dust particles can also be attracted to one another (i.e. agglomerate), and then pass out of the filter without being captured. They will, however, now be larger particles which will pass through the system to be further enlarged or captured on the filter on a subsequent pass.
- The dust particles may pass through the filter completely unchanged. In this case, they will be agglomerated or captured on a subsequent pass.
The combination of electrostatic polarization along with the process of agglomeration makes the Dynamic Electrostatic Air Filter completely unique and a highly efficient air filter (in some cases, comparable to a HEPA). This is achieved with very low resistance to airflow.
For Frequently Asked Questions: Click Here.
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