Modelling comparison of relative performance of gas-phase filter at high and low challenge concentration

Adsorption based air cleaning technologies have long been employed in various industrial applications. To guide the selection, design and maintenance of adsorptive filters for residential and office buildings, it is necessary to validate the available mass transfer-based models for the indoor air concentrations. This paper gives an overview of the existing models of sorbent-based gas filters and compares their capability to predict the filter performance over its life time. A sensitivity analysis of models' parameters showed that the effective diffusivity has strong dependence on the concentration which is more noticeable for pore surface diffusion model. Considering the big discrepancies of predicted and measured breakthrough curves at low concentrations using pore diffusion model and homogeneous-solid diffusion model, this suggests that the lifetime estimation of the filter is still questionable. The influencing parameters were either adapted from the literature or derived from mass balances to be the slope of adsorption isotherm and surface diffusion.