scope:

INTRODUCTION

In 2006, the ASHRAE Board of Directors approved a strategic plan to lead the advancement of sustainable building design and operation. As William Harrison, 2008-2009 ASHRAE President, said in his speech 'Maintain to Sustain - Delivering ASHRAE's Sustainability Promise' at ASHRAE annual meeting in Salt Lake City (Harrison, 2008), sustainability for ASHRAE means energy efficiency and healthy, productive indoor environments. How can we delivering such sustainability promise to air filtration in the HVAC system? We have the standards available in the industry to test general ventilation air filters for removal efficiency by particle size.

ASHRAE 52.2 and EN779 are the most popular ones in the world with the former widely used in North America and the latter in Europe. But none of them has ever addressed the issues on energy efficiency. As energy becomes a global problem today, there is increasing demand to establish a method generally accepted to the industry to determine how to classify a filter's energy efficiency. This paper is a preliminary research to introduce two methods which can be used in the industry for the energy classification. Experiments were made with 6 air filters (V-pack, bag, box, panel) by ASHRAE 52.2 full test and 7 representative filter media (flat sheets) by TSI 8130 Automated Filter Tester to demonstrate how to use each method to classify the energy efficiency.