Multilevel structured PASS nanofiber filter with outstanding thermal stability and excellent mechanical property for high-efficiency particulate matter removal

Particulate matter (PM) pollution from industrialization poses a great threat to people's health. Although fiber-based filters are used effectively to capture PM, the traditional filters with large diameter suffer from low filtration efficiency, high pressure drop and low temperature resistance. In this study, multilayer poly arylene sulfide sulfone (M-PASS) composite filter was designed and fabricated via electrospinning technology. The M-PASS composite filter is sandwich-structure. Due to the unique structure and composition, the M-PASS filter exhibited outstanding removal efficiency of 99.97 ± 0.0050%, extremely low air resistance of 44.3 ± 0.7 Pa, excellent quality factor (QF) of 0.19 ± 0.0019 Pa-1, and desirable mechanical strength of 7.0 ± 0.2 MPa. Furthermore, the as-prepared M-PASS filter can remain outstanding filtration performance at 200.0 ℃ due to the high thermal stability of PASS and the removal efficiency was still above 95.2 ± 0.4% after long-term filtration test. These results demonstrate that the structure of filter is the important one for air filtration and the M-PASS nanofiber filters have great potential in PM removal, especially under high temperature conditions.