Polytetrafluoroethylene/Polyphenylene Sulfide Needle-Punched Triboelectric Air Filter for Efficient Particulate Matter Removal

The demand for air filtration materials in recent years has been substantially increasing on a worldwide scale because people are paying extensive attention to particulate matter (PM) pollution. In this work, we report a type of needle-punched triboelectric air filter (N-TAF) consisting of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) fibers modified by silica nanoparticles and polyphenylene sulfide (PPS) fibers. Compared to conventional electrostatic precipitators, the N-TAF can be charged online by a unique nonwoven processing technology without additional energy consumption and toxic ozone emission. Owing to the triboelectrification effect, a large number of charges were generated during the process of carding and needle-punching, resulting in an increased filtration performance. Benefiting from the addition of silica nanoparticles, the PTFE fibers are endowed with many pores and grooves and substantial surface roughness, which contributes to the enhancement of triboelectrification. As a result, the N-TAF with 2 wt % silica nanoparticles (N-TAF-2) exhibited a high removal efficiency of 89.4% for PM, which is 45% higher than unmodified N-TAF (61.8%), and a low pressure drop of 18.6 Pa. Meanwhile, the decay of the removal efficiency for N-TAF-2 remained at a low level (6.4%) for 60 days. More importantly, N-TAF-2 could realize a high efficiency of 99.7% and a low pressure drop of 55.4 Pa at a high surface density. In addition, the washed N-TAF has an excellent charge regeneration performance via air blowing or manual rubbing, thus recovering the removal efficiency easily and rapidly. Ultimately, the powerful dust holding capacity (227 g m–2) for N-TAF-2 indicates that the filter has a long service life, which makes it a promising air purification material. The filter reported in this work has the potential to be practically applied to air purification fields because it has excellent filtration performance and is easy to be produced on a large industrial scale.