Investigation on Designing Meltblown Fibers for the Filtering Layer of a Mask by Cross-Scale Simulations
Jie Shi, Yuanzuo Zou, Jie‐Xin Wang, Xiaofei Zeng, Guang‐Wen Chu, Bao‐Chang Sun, Dan Wang, Jian‐Feng Chen
Abstract
As an important personal protective item against the COVID-19 pandemic, masks have recently attracted much attention in both academic and industrial contexts. We established a modified numerical model for investigating the dominant factors on the performance of masks, including the thickness and fill rate of melt-blown fibers for a filtering layer, as well as the diameters and surface charge density of the fibers. It is found that increasing the surface charge of melt-blown fibers can improve the filtration efficiency of the melt-blown layer with a low respiratory pressure drop. The relationship between the filtered particle diameter and filtration efficiency of respirators is also investigated, which demonstrated that particles with a diameter of 0.1–0.2 μm are the most difficult to filter out. Combined with molecular dynamics simulations and experimental verifications, the effect of hydrophobicity on the droplet adhesion and the water blocking performance was revealed. The knowledge obtained in this work provides reference for the design of high-performance masks.