Assessment of Different Experimental Setups to Determine Viral Filtration Efficiency of Face Masks

Arijana Filipić (), Katja Fric, Maja Ravnikar and Polona Kogovšek
Additional contact information
Arijana Filipić: Department of Biotechnology and Systems Biology, National Institute of Biology, Večna pot 111, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Katja Fric: Department of Biotechnology and Systems Biology, National Institute of Biology, Večna pot 111, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Maja Ravnikar: Department of Biotechnology and Systems Biology, National Institute of Biology, Večna pot 111, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Polona Kogovšek: Department of Biotechnology and Systems Biology, National Institute of Biology, Večna pot 111, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 22, 1-13

Abstract: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many new materials and masks came onto the market. To determine their suitability, several standards specify which properties to test, including bacterial filtration efficiency (BFE), while none describe how to determine viral filtration efficiency (VFE), a property that is particularly important in times of pandemic. Therefore, we focused our research on evaluating the suitability and efficiency of different systems for determining VFE. Here, we evaluated the VFE of 6 mask types (e.g., a surgical mask, a respirator, material for mask production, and cloth masks) with different filtration efficiencies in four experimental setups and compared the results with BFE results. The study included 17 BFE and 22 VFE experiments with 73 and 81 mask samples tested, respectively. We have shown that the masks tested had high VFE (>99% for surgical masks and respirators, ≥98% for material, and 87–97% for cloth masks) and that all experimental setups provided highly reproducible and reliable VFE results (coefficient of variation < 6%). Therefore, the VFE tests described in this study can be integrated into existing standards for mask testing.

Keywords: Face masks; Virus filtration efficiency; Bacterial filtration efficiency; EN 14683:2019+AC:2019; Air sampler (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/22/15353/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/22/15353/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:22:p:15353-:d:978812

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().