Estimating service lives of air-purifying respirator cartridges for reactive gas removal.

A mathematical model has been developed to estimate service lives of air-purifying respirator cartridges that remove gases reactively from flowing air. Most gases, because of their high volatility and low polarizability, are not effectively removed by physical adsorption on activated carbon. Models previously developed for toxic organic vapors cannot estimate service lives of cartridges for toxic gases. Often, an activated carbon is impregnated with a chemical to enhance gas removal by chemical reaction(s). The kinds of reactions, types and amounts of impregnants, and effects of the presence of water vary; therefore, the model requires user inputs of gas capacity and water effect parameters. Ideally, these should be available from manufacturers of the cartridges. If they are not, they can be extracted from measured breakthrough times using this model. The key to this model is the observation that adsorption rates of gases can be adequately quantified by the same correlations that have been reported for organic vapors. The resulting model has been used to correlate and predict breakthrough times for several common toxic gases.