Design of Indoor Air Cleaner with Activated Carbon as Adsorbent
Putranto Manuhoro, Israr Saputra, Nugrahanto Widagdo, Dian Maulana
Gas and Petrochemical Engineering Dept
*Mechanical Engineering Dept
Faculty of Engineering Universitas of Indonesia
Kampus Baru UI, Depok 16424
 

ABSTRACT

Laboratory, office room, or public rooms usually are equipped by air conditioner or fan in order to make room comfortable, but many people doesn’t think about air quality. We can find a lot of impurities in the air, such as nicotine, smoke, or volatile organic compound which are very dangerous for our health. Air conditioner and fan doesn’t have capability to clean these impurities, therefore everyday we are respiring bad air. Beside that it is not easy to find the apparel that has capabilities to filter those impurities.

Indoor air cleaner is apparel that has capabilities to filter and adsorb the impurities from the air, so we if we have bad air condition, such as there are too much smokes we can clean them up by operating this apparel in the room and let it clean the air. This apparel uses activated carbon as adsorbent which is putted in the container. We design the container by considering technical problem; we can easily remove and put the container into the apparel if the activated carbon can’t be used anymore. On the other hand we also design the container to obtain lower pressure drop by choosing grain structure for activated carbon and arrange it in the container.

Fig1. Indoor Air Cleaner

In designing this apparel, we are using particle board, 2 fans, and acrylic 5mm for the activated carbon container. This apparel has dimension 60 cm x 30.5 cm x 30.5 cm, and dimension of container is 12 cm long and 10 cm diameter. There are 4 containers which are putted in parallel. We divided this apparel into 3 rooms, the first is suction room, than the second is container room, and the third one is exhaust room.

We have done some test to measure the operation effectiveness of this apparel, we used gas analyzer (GA) to obtain data, GA is usually used to measured car emission, because with this analyzer we can read the data directly. We put indoor air cleaner in small room which has been injected 10 liters smoke, then we operate this apparel in 30 minutes and we take the data every 2 minutes, and we repeated for 10 times. From table and the graphic we can see the result. We are measuring CO, CO2, NOX, and HC because these gases have represented unhealthy air.

 
Table1. Initial and Final Condition of Experimental Room

Fig2. Result of Indoor Air Cleaner

All of the gas can be eliminated less than 30 minutes, even the fog, it has disappeared in 25 minutes. From the result above we can get conclusion that this apparel has effectively filter the air impurities and improving air quality in the room, but we have to improving its appearance because the appearance is too simple, it isn’t considering the aesthetic and the material exterior. We can’t sell this product only by showing its quality but if we want the market interested in it we have to change the appearance and the material.