Dr. Thomas Caesar
Dr. Caesar is a well-known leading expert in the global filtration industry. He has been working in the filtration industry with extensive experience for over 20 years. Dr. Caesar is now working at Freudenberg Filtration Technologies, Germany, responsible for global product development and technical product management in the business unit Industrial Filtration. He serves as Convenor of ISO/TC142/WG12 “Sustainability of air filters,” Chairman of Eurovent Certification Compliance Committee Air Filters, Co-Chairmen of the Eurovent Association Product Group Air Filters, and as an Expert in several working groups at VDI, DIN, Eurovent, CEN, and ISO.
Sustainable Air Filtration for Improved Indoor Air Quality
During the COVID19 pandemic, public awareness of air quality has increased. Besides infectious viruses, the air may contain other harmful particles and gases like bacteria, allergens, toxic gases, VOCs, or other small particles that can already be harmful because of their small size. To ensure high indoor air quality, filtration of the building intake air and the recirculated air is essential. After almost three years of Corona, other topics like the dramatically rising energy cost and climate change have also regained awareness. Air filtration implies a flow resistance and requires energy to overcome this resistance. Therefore, the need for improved indoor air quality might be seen as a contradiction to the imperative to save energy and reduce CO2 emissions. In fact, it is a classical optimization task in engineering. Also, sustainability is not only ecological sustainability. There is also social sustainability, which implies the health and safety aspects. Hence, high-quality, energy-efficient filtration is, per se, sustainable, helping to sustain the healthiest environment by using a minimum of energy.
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Eurovent, the European Industry Association for Indoor Climate, Process Cooling, and Food Cold Chain Technologies, has developed guidelines that give filtration recommendations by linking outdoor air conditions to application-specific minimum supply air conditions. The outdoor air, as well as the supply air concentrations for fine dust, are based on the WHO recommendations. Additionally, to the filter efficiency recommendations, an energy efficiency classification system is offered by Eurovent, allowing the user to choose the system with the most significant hand print at the lowest footprint.