Conventional face masks suffer from limitations such as high pressure drop, discomfort, and limited reusability. To address these issues, we developed a wearable respiratory protection device (WRPD) that combines an air curtain shield with a curved electrostatic precipitation (EP) module. The curved EP module showed a high fine particle (0.3 μ m) removal efficiency of 99.3 % ± 0.6 % at −3.5 kV and generated low levels of ozone below 0.24 ppb. However, the efficiency of the EP module decreased to 85.8 % ± 0.8 % when it was integrated into the WRPD. In the WRPD, the air curtain shield efficiently blocked airborne and droplet‐sized particles with 91.6 % ± 1.8 % efficiency at flow rates exceeding 241 L/min under 0.7 m/s particle intrusion but showed limited effectiveness for submicron particles. However, the full WRPD system with both the air curtain shield and curved EP module operating achieved 94.5% removal efficiency for submicron particles and 99.8 % ± 0.2 % for larger airborne and droplet‐sized particles. The air curtain shield not only prevented ambient air mixing but also enhanced the purity of the air delivered by the curved EP module by more than 10% compared to the WRPD operated using only the EP module.
Kwak et al. (Thu,) studied this question.