Challenges during Deployment of Cabin Air Quality Enhancers in Current Mobility Solutions

In the past five years, Indian cities have been consistently appearing in the list of top 15 world’s most polluted cities. Every day, a common man in India spends more than 2 hours on the road due to numerous reasons, thus exposed to inhale highly polluted air. Further, the passenger car users is exposed to ~ 6 times more polluted air as compared to ambient air reason being the air is recirculated through the air conditioning system. Prolonged exposure to such polluted/ recirculated air shows increasing trend in respiratory illnesses, breathing discomfort and fatigue.

This paper discusses the key challenges involved in incorporating cabin air filter as cabin air quality enhancer in current mobility solutions. The engineering challenges like accommodating the cabin air filter in Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system without compromising its performance, selection of appropriate filter media to meet the targeted performance requirements, and its validation through objective and subjective assessment for conformance before handing over to the customer are detailed through this work. The objective assessment comprises of the expensive bench tests while subjective assessment requires highly trained expert with calibrated noses. Therefore development of cabin air filter specific to its application demands for heavy development expenses and time, too. Ultimately, the development cost will be recovered through initial product price/ part replacement price from customer. Furthermore, one more challenge for automotive OEMs is to convince the customer to pay for this add-on feature for better air quality inside a vehicle cabin, which arises due to cost sensitive market like India and poor awareness about ill effects of polluted air on human health

In present scenario, cabin air filters are horizontally deployed from European market to Indian usage which clogs in short span of time and fails on efficiency and effectiveness front. This paper also covers the aspects to be considered during deployment of cabin air filters considering typical Indian environment and usage.