I just want to say: I love the idea of fan blades that are themselves filters. One of the central challenges with air purifiers, is that a lot of energy is “wasted” trying to push air through filter materials. With fan blades, I think essentially all of the energy would be used either for filtering or for pushing air, in a sense this purifier would be 100% efficient? Also I worry (only a little bit) that Jeff’s ceiling-fan idea might increase the load on the motor, and this would seem to totally eliminate that concern.
Though in practice, this seems hard. I guess you’d want some rigid fan blades with “slots” you could put commodity filters in a standardized shape? Not sure there are any cheap standard filters that would make this easy.
It feels pretty inefficient to me. Filters are too big a resistance for air flow in this case and it will rather swirl around fan blades.
Why not attach filters right to the fan blades or even instead of them?
I built and tested a prototype and it works well: https://www.jefftk.com/p/ceiling-air-purifier
I just want to say: I love the idea of fan blades that are themselves filters. One of the central challenges with air purifiers, is that a lot of energy is “wasted” trying to push air through filter materials. With fan blades, I think essentially all of the energy would be used either for filtering or for pushing air, in a sense this purifier would be 100% efficient? Also I worry (only a little bit) that Jeff’s ceiling-fan idea might increase the load on the motor, and this would seem to totally eliminate that concern.
Though in practice, this seems hard. I guess you’d want some rigid fan blades with “slots” you could put commodity filters in a standardized shape? Not sure there are any cheap standard filters that would make this easy.
There’s a way to test this. If you put a piece of paper next to the HVAC filters around the fan, does it stick to them or fall down?
That is a quick test, but a better one is checking how well it removes particles from the air.
Indeed, but I don’t actually know how to do that.
Jeff did it by burning a set number of matches to ash in the room, and testing the particulates with an air quality monitor. https://www.jefftk.com/p/testing-air-purifiers