Residual Life Indicator for Adsorptive and Reactive Single-Pass Filtration Systems

In peacetime environments, concerns over improbable encounter with agent threats are supplanted by the need to understand and assess the performance status or residual life (RL) capacity of sorbent-based technologies used in Collective Protection (ColPro) systems. Systems such as the M98 and M48A1 run continuously and therefore sample large volumes of outside air over their lifetime. It is well-known that the performance of the ASZM-TEDA carbon used in these systems is significantly degraded over time as a function of environmental air flow through the sorbent bed. This degradation is primarily due to the presence of several ubiquitous environmental air contaminants including water vapor, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides. Given the dynamic presence of these environmental contaminants, varying in concentration over time and within and between regions throughout the world, it is critical to assess the RL of filtration media regularly in order to maintain a viable readiness status. These filtration systems use large carbon filters with changeout protocols that are costly and require significant resources, logistics, and system down-time. Additionally, periodic sampling and testing of the filter carbon requires destructive testing, and thus a technology capable of assessing and predicting the RL of these filtration media in real-time, dynamic environments is needed.