Development of Electrospun Nanofibrous Filters for Controlling Coronavirus Aerosols

Airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 plays a critical role in spreading COVID-19. To protect public health, we designed and fabricated electrospun nanofibrous air filters that hold promise for applications personal protective equipment (PPE) the indoor environment. Due to ultrafine nanofibers (?300 nm), had much smaller pore size comparison surgical mask cloth masks (a couple micrometers versus tens hundreds micrometers). A coronavirus strain served as surrogate was used generate aerosols filtration efficiency tests, which can better represent other agents aerosol generation previous studies. The showed excellent performance by capturing up 99.9% aerosols, outperformed many commercial face masks. In addition, observed same filter or removed NaCl equivalently less effectively when both were generated from system. Our work paves new avenue advancing developing controlling airborne transmission.