Polarity-Dominated Stable N97 Respirators for Airborne Virus Capture Based on Nanofibrous Membranes

The longevity and reusability of N95-grade filtering facepiece respirators (N95 FFRs) are limited by consecutive donning and disinfection treatments. Herein, we developed stable N97 nanofibrous respirators based on chemically modified surface to enable remarkable filtration characteristics via polarity driven interaction. This was achieved by a thin-film coated polyacrylonitrile nanofibrous membrane (TFPNM), giving an overall long-lasting filtration performance with high quality factor at 0.42 Pa⁻¹ (filtration efficiency: over 97 %; pressure drop: around 10 Pa), which is higher than that of the commercial N95 FFRs (0.10–0.41 Pa⁻¹) tested with a flow rate of 5 L min⁻¹ and the 0.26 μm NaCl aerosol. A coxsackie B4 virus filtration test demonstrated that TFPNM also had strong virus capture capacity of 97.67 %. As compared with N95 FFRs, the TFPNM was more resistant to a wider variety of disinfection protocols, and the overall filtration characteristics remained N97 standard.