Development and performance evaluation of environmental chamber for air cleaner detection

Key words: 
• environmental chamber /
• air cleaner /
• background concentration /
• recovery rate /
• natural decay

Abstract: A large-scale environmental chamber was developed, which was made of the inner chamber, outer chamber, air purification system, pollution source device and air sampling system. Among them, the inner chamber with the volume of 30 m3 is the key part of the test chamber. The experimental result shows that the deviation of temperature and relative humidity are δT≤2.5℃ and δRH≤5％ respectively．The body leakage is 0.03～1.02 m3/h under pressure difference of 0～5 Pa between the inside and the outside of the chamber. After cleaning,with the single pollutant background concentration less than 20 μg/m3, total volatile organic compounds （TVOC） is less than 90 μg/m3. The recovery rates of the chamber system are 86.6%，83.4%，82.9% and 81.5% under four kinds of amount of 37% formaldehyde solution for the representation of pollutants. Under the conditon of 21℃ and RH 40%，the natural decay of three kinds of pollutants which are formaldehyde,benzene and toluene in this chamber are 6.7%,8.9% and 4.7%， respectively. Experimental result shows that the environmental chamber runs well and can be used to detect the performance of air cleaners.