Low-Cost, Efficient Air Filter Made from Polymer in Surgical Gloves

Stanford University engineering professor Yi Cui and his students have turned a polymer commonly used in surgical gloves into a low-cost, highly efficient air filter. It could be used to improve face masks and window screens, and maybe even exhaust from power plants.

Transcript

00:00:00 Stanford University. In the last couple years, I've traveled to China often, and I saw the terrible air pollution problem. There are a lot of particles, pollutants, in the air, so I come back and have the motivation to think about what can we do to remove those particles. That's what the engineers like to do, is solve problems. So we started thinking about new types of nanofilters.

00:00:36 The polymer is the same as surgical glass polymer. They can adhere and take out those particles very efficiently. We use a process called electrospinning to spin out this polymer into nanofibers. Their diameter is about 1,000 times thinner than a human's hair. And using this process, we can make very long, very thin fibers forming a match. And it doesn't block the air flow, so it's very efficient.

00:01:11 As you can see, smoke cannot move from one portal to the other portals because there are nanofilters right there. These really show the efficiency of filtering out the particles, because the smoke we can see is really due to the particles. So you can use this new type of filters to use in personal masking. You can use that for putting in the car exhaust to take out this particle. You can also put that into the power plant, where

00:01:45 you burn coal to generate electricity to remove those particles. For more, please visit us at www.stanford.edu.